Nicole Junkerman on Note-Taking That Actually Sticks

Most of us have taken thousands of notes and forgotten almost all of them. The pages pile up, neat and well-meaning, and then quietly do nothing. Nicole Junkerman has thought a great deal about why this happens, and about the small differences that turn note-taking from a comforting ritual into something that genuinely helps you understand and remember. This page sets out what Nicole Junkerman has found, in plain terms you can try today.

The short version is that the value of a note lies not in the writing but in the thinking the writing forces. Good note-taking is not a recording device. It is a way of processing an idea, and notes that skip the processing are the ones that fade. Everything below follows from that single, slightly inconvenient truth.

Notes in your own words

The single biggest improvement most people can make is to stop copying and start translating. A note that copies the source word for word demands almost no thought, and almost nothing sticks. A note that puts the idea into your own words forces you to understand it first, and that act of understanding is what makes it stay. This is the heart of the Feynman technique: if you cannot explain a thing simply, you have not yet understood it, and the note will quietly tell you so.

Nicole Junkerman applies a small, strict rule here. Before writing a note, close the book or look away from the screen. If you can write the idea down from memory, in plain language, you have understood it. If you cannot, that is useful information too: it means going back for another pass. The note becomes a quiet test of comprehension rather than an act of transcription, and the difference in what you retain is striking.

The note you can find again

A note you cannot find, or cannot understand later, is the same as no note at all. Nicole Junkerman keeps two simple habits to guard against this. First, every note gets enough context to make sense on its own months later: a date, a source, and a line on why it mattered. Second, related notes live together rather than scattered across a dozen apps and pads. A note's value compounds only when you can actually return to it, and you can only return to what you can find.

A few principles that help

Across years of trial and error, a handful of principles have proved their worth, and Nicole Junkerman keeps coming back to them:

• Write fewer notes, but better ones. A page of ten thoughtful notes beats a notebook of a hundred thoughtless ones.
• Always note why something matters, not just what it says. The why is what makes a note worth keeping.
• Link a new note to something you already know, so it joins a web rather than floating alone.
• Leave a note slightly unfinished when a question remains, so it pulls you back to think again.

Why review is the secret

Here is the part almost everyone skips, and it is the part that matters most. Notes are not made to be written and abandoned; they are made to be revisited. The research on memory is remarkably clear on this. Both spaced repetition, revisiting an idea at growing intervals, and the testing effect, actively recalling it rather than rereading, dramatically improve how much you retain. Nicole Junkerman treats review not as an optional extra but as the entire point of taking notes in the first place.

In practice this is gentler than it sounds. Nicole Junkerman simply flicks back through recent notes every so often, with no pressure and no schedule to obey. Old ideas resurface, connections appear, and half-finished questions sometimes answer themselves. The notes that survive this casual review are the ones worth keeping; the rest can quietly fade without guilt. A note reread once or twice is worth ten that are written and never seen again.

From notes to understanding

The deepest purpose of note-taking is not to store facts but to build understanding, and the two are easy to confuse. A pile of stored facts is just a worse version of a search engine. Real understanding comes when notes start to connect, when an idea from one book illuminates a question from another. Nicole Junkerman finds that this only happens when notes are written thoughtfully, kept together, and revisited often enough to find each other across the months.

Letting notes talk to each other

The richest moment in note-taking comes when two notes, written months apart, suddenly connect. An idea from a history book answers a question raised by a novel; a concept from a science article illuminates something half-understood in a biography. Nicole Junkerman actively looks for these links, and notes them when they appear, because a note joined to others is worth far more than a note left to float alone. Understanding, in the end, is largely a matter of connections.

To make these connections possible, related notes need to live near one another rather than scattered across a dozen notebooks and apps. Nicole Junkerman keeps everything in one trusted place and revisits it gently, so that older notes stay within reach of newer ones. It is in this shared space that notes begin to cross-pollinate, and a personal store of jottings slowly turns into something more like a private web of thought that can actually be drawn upon.

It is worth saying plainly that the goal is understanding, not collection. A vast archive of notes you never reread is simply a tidy way of forgetting. Nicole Junkerman would rather keep a modest set of notes that are genuinely revisited and connected, in the spirit of the old commonplace book, than a sprawling database admired for its size and consulted by no one. Fewer notes, better kept and actually reread, will always teach you more.

So take fewer notes and take them better. Write in your own words, give each note enough context to survive on its own, keep related notes together, and revisit them gently and often. Do that, and your notes will stop being a graveyard of good intentions and start becoming a genuine extension of your thinking. For a friendly, university-made guide to the habits behind all this, OpenLearn on how to learn is a generous place to begin. To see where this habit comes from, read how Nicole Junkerman keeps a learning notebook, and for the reading side of it, why she reads with a pencil. It all returns, as ever, to Nicole Junkerman.

Published 19 April 2026 · by Nicole Junkerman