How can you increase your learning output?
When it comes to learning a particular topic, there are two main components that are essential. The first being understanding and the second memorizing. This can be done using a common technique called note-taking. This technique helps one to summarize or train your thoughts and write down key points. At times the idea of summarizing and writing something may get messy, unorganized, confused, and leave you stranded. There are a few tweaks you can make to your note-taking technique to retain information better and that is where I want to introduce you to Notion. Notion is a content management workspace software that lets you organize your notes, tasks, daily to-do's, plans, etc in a highly organized manner.
Essentially when you take notes on anything it is very important to focus on the bigger picture and not just the key details. Often times it happens that we only focus on the details and lose sight of the overall perspective. Notion has this really great feature of toggling which you can use to your advantage. With toggling you can effectively summarize the subheadings of your notes and what this does is, at a glance allows you to know all the topics under that subheading and if you want to dive into an individual topic you toggle right into it. It's a feature that will make your life simple but also not lose that big picture perspective.
Having understood a topic, how can you now memorize or commit it to your memory? In addition to note-taking, I realized that there are another two techniques that actually let information sweep into the brain and remain there. Active recall involves continuously testing ourselves on a particular topic and space repetition involves repeating a topic in your mind over time. The problem with taking notes is that it is passive and usually when you re-read your notes you either highlight certain lines and only remind yourself of a particular context.
The fundamental concept of retaining information is through actively engaging your brain to ask questions to a particular answer. With Notion, you can use the toggle feature to create questions based on the summary notes you have written down. So looking at a question you are actively engaging your brain to recall the information at hand. This method will genuinely help you develop your brain to recall information faster instead of wasting countless hours passively re-reading it.
Space repetition is something that will help you combat the forgetting curve. With any particular topic once fed into your brain, the memory of that topic will fade away exponentially over time. Ever wondered when you learn something and you come back to it a month or two later, you realize you've forgotten all of it. So the idea behind space repetition is that you would repeat a topic with spaced intervals over time to interrupt the forgetting curve. So if you learn about a topic on day 1, then you revisit that topic on day 4 and the cycle goes on and so this way you interrupt your chances of forgetting the topic as well as decrease the duration of the forgetting curve. This technique will eventually lead you to grasp the topic for the long term.
Last but not least a key factor in increasing your learning output is organization. Notion is great with organizing your notes, tasks, to-do lists, plans, etc. It has great in-built templates, as well as the ones created by different people, which you can use as a starting point. I highly recommend you to use Notion to increase your learning output, productivity, and organization skills as I use it to balance my work and business every single day.
