Many students and academics take copious notes while reading journal articles, textbooks, and other materials. The act of note-taking helps us process information more deeply as we read.
Forces engagement
Taking notes on a reading requires active engagement and forces you to think critically about the key takeaways. However, if you know you won’t delete those notes after you finish, you may passively compile details with the assumption that you’ll always have the notes to refer back to later if need be. By making yourself delete all reading notes when done, you incentivize more careful, thoughtful notetaking up front since you know you won’t have those notes indefinitely.
Encourages recall
Having stacks of permanent reading notes creates a false sense of confidence in your knowledge. Just because you have 10 pages of notes on a research paper doesn’t mean you fully grasp and retain all the key insights from your reading. When you regularly delete your notes after finishing reading, it encourages you to thoroughly process and mentally file away the core ideas. With no permanent notes to refer back to, you push yourself to truly internalize details rather than relying on your ability to always look information up later.
Avoids misconceptions
Reading notes compiled at the moment often lack context once removed from the original reading material. Bits of information, statistics, or direct quotes captured hastily on a first read-through sometimes perpetuate misconceptions or inaccuracies if reviewed later without the accompanying text. By removing your initial rough notes after reading, you reduce the chance of misrepresenting concepts from the original text.
Enables “Big Picture” learning
Reading notes often get stuck in the weeds of specifics without capturing big-picture conceptual insights. By deleting the granular details from your notes after finishing reading, you make space to immerse in broader principles and patterns. Too many permanent notes on minor details distract from internalizing higher-order learning on key theories, models, and frameworks. Deleting the small stuff liberates mental bandwidth for meaningful knowledge.
Frees up headspace
how does privnote work? Trying to permanently capture every possible detail in your notes to refer back to indefinitely is cognitively draining. The pressure to compile extensive notes dominates your mental headspace as you read important materials for the first time. Deleting your notes after finishing reading removes this mental burden, freeing up headspace to simply absorb concepts rather than transcribe details. Getting rid of notes allows you to direct focus toward comprehension.
Curbs perfectionism tendencies
Attempting to take perfectly thorough, flawlessly organized notes is often a manifestation of perfectionism. Compulsive notetakers will painstakingly record nearly every piece of information to avoid ever being caught without an important detail. Deleting your reading notes helps curb perfectionistic documentation tendencies. Keeping your initial reading notes perpetuates a fixation on comprehensive documentation. Removing the notes forces you to shift energy toward learning itself.
Develops memory
If you never delete your reading notes, you’ll come to subconsciously rely on these external memory repositories rather than your internal memory capabilities. You stunt your ability to assimilate and retrieve concepts when you use permanent notes as a crutch. By removing notes after you finish reading, you push your biological memory capacities and strengthen recall abilities over time – no notes required.
