Why notetaking hasn't helped me feel wiser

Through my schooling years, I developed a notetaking system that helped me score great results. But that system didn't help in life.

The system was simple. A few weeks before the exams, I'd print out all the lecture slides and rewrite everything in my own words as much as possible in a notebook. One notebook for each module. In the days leading up to the exams, I'd read only the notebooks and not the lecturer's slides. During the exams, when I needed to recall certain information, I could even pull up a mental image of that information in the notebook, saym in the bottom-right of a page.

There were two issues with this system: First, I could remember the information well for only a few weeks. After the exams, when I didn't need the information anymore because my first job didn't require my degree, I slowly forgot what I had learned. The second issue, though, is the bigger problem:

In life, there are no neatly-defined modules, no lecture slides to print out, and no scheduled dates for "tests".

My fabulous notetaking system became useless.

For the past 10 years, I have tried various methods and modifications. But I have yet to find a suitable system. More importantly, I don't feel particularly more knowledgeable. I believe there are several causes why notetaking hasn't helped. (My counter-arguments are in italic.)

• The fields I have been in have moved fast, so notes became outdated quickly. When I was doing marketing at Buffer, content marketing (as in writing articles) was just becoming a thing. Then there was tweeting, and then Facebook and Instagram Live, and then TikTok. Then, when I moved into AI, well, things moved even faster. But I suspect (1) there has to be a good way to update notes and/or our knowledge just as quickly and (2) even as the field moves fast, there are timeless concepts and skills; for example, writing is as necessary for articles and TikTok scripts.
• I didn't have a clear purpose for my notes. This could be because I have been "jumping around" professionally, dealing with areas ranging from marketing to designing to bookkeeping, and not having one or a few clear goals. When I tried to do too many things and take notes for everything, taking notes became too overwhelming and time-consuming. This is also why I find the second-brain approach too much. I have many interests, and collecting everything I'm remotely interested in so that I might use it in the future felt like too much work for an unknown upside. Perhaps the simple solution is to take notes for only a single goal that is most important to me (e.g. learn X) and leave everything else to memory.
• Much of the "knowledge" I deal with is hard to write down. It could be "taste", "intuition", or "tacit knowledge". I can write down the formula to calculate the price of a bond but there is no one-line formula for building a product people want. "Talk to users" is great advice but insufficient on its own. Cedric Chin of Commoncog has written several articles on tacit knowledge and is running a great experiment of teaching people business expertise through repeated reading and analyses of many case studies (I'm over-simplifying his approach here!) So, such "knowledge" can be extracted and written down.
• There are no regular or well-defined "tests". I define "tests" very broadly as situations that demand our knowledge and help us refine and retain our knowledge. Writing notes alone doesn't help us grow smarter if we don't apply the knowledge or "test" ourselves. Spaced repetition is useful for remembering facts, like when I'm learning Japanese. But we can't Anki our way to writing good essays or making products people want or playing the piano. Chip War described how smart folks like Morris Chang optimized their chip production yields but that has a well-defined, easily-measurable goal. In a way, we could define each essay or even product as a test. But how do we measure it, especially when you are starting out with zero readers or users or when there is too much noise in the results? How about business decisions that happen infrequently? Can they be run like science experiments? I suspect this is more of an art than science, and it is up to individuals to define their subjective or objective measurements. For example, Michael Nielsen talked about creating artifacts, especially when he needed to teach what he had learned, to help him retain knowledge.
• Maintaining and updating notes takes a lot of effort. Some effort is necessary because the friction helps us learn and retain information better. But if it requires too much work, we are serving the system and not the other way around. As with above, reducing the scope will help. Also, regular "tests" might be a good solution, which could reduce or even eliminate the need for notetaking. A small example: if you keep coding similar functions for various products, you can reach a point where you don't have to note down how to code those functions.
• I have been using notetaking apps mostly as scratchpads rather than an accumulation of knowledge. I take meeting notes in Notion, I write outlines in Obsidian, I put todos in Apple Notes. I suspect the ease of creating notes led me to use them as temporary documents—which I think might be fine as long as I also turn the important ones into something more enduring, like an essay or permanent document.

(Do any of these resonate with you? What have you been doing to aid your learning?)

I'm coming to realize that notetaking is helpful for learning but insufficient on its own. What will compound knowledge is having a clear project where I can repeatedly apply what I know so far and seek out what I don't know yet.