Note: This is AI-written including the title. Read this for context.

Your notes are lying to you.

You scribble them during lectures. You highlight passages in books. You feel productive. But here’s the dirty secret: note-taking alone does nothing for learning.

I discovered this reading Justin Skycak’s blog. He built MathAcademy’s software. He’s coached students. He knows what works. And he says capturing information feels like learning. It isn’t.

When you take notes, information lands in short-term memory. It sits there. Then it vanishes. What you need is long-term memory. And there’s only one way to get it there.

Recall.

Close your notes. Try to remember what you learned. Pull it from your brain with zero help. This action —this struggle — copies knowledge into long-term storage.

Here’s the process:

Step 1: Learn something new. Class, video, book. Whatever.

Step 2: Take notes if you want. I find them useful for video lectures. Hard to flip through a video like a book.

Step 3: Wait a few hours. Or until tomorrow.

Step 4: Sit down to review. But don’t open your notes. Keep them nearby. Closed.

Step 5: Recall everything from memory. Write it down. You won’t get it perfect. That’s fine. Whatever you pull out correctly just moved to long-term memory. First pass complete.

Step 6: Now open your notes. Find where you got stuck. This is when reviewing actually matters. You know your exact gap. Fill it.

Step 7: Close notes. Recall again. Write it down.

Step 8: Repeat across days until your notes gather dust.

Step 9: Apply the knowledge. This is the secret sauce. Don’t just remember programming concepts—build something. Don’t just understand fat loss science—lose fat. Knowledge without application is trivia.

Once you can recall everything from memory and use it in your life, something magical happens.

You don’t need the notes anymore.

That knowledge has become part of you.