It’s been almost exactly a year since I was really taking notes. Before they got ruined, I was using lined paper and cheap duotangs, although a 3 ringed binder would be nicer to work in.
I’ll write notes with whatever I have laying around, but gel pens are usually what I prefer. The attached notes were done with a pen from a 12 pack of “Studio” gel pens from the dollar store.
My notes are very messy and contained a lot of corrections using arrows, scratched out words, interjecting thoughts, random doodles and scribbles etc.
They’re usually as terse as I can make them, and I usually put the page numbers (or cite youtube title and channel, or article title and website) above the current section of notes.
I was experimenting with mindmaps recently. You might recognize the notes from the article cited Does anyone else use hand gestures while encoding in a memory palace? Is this okay for competitions? - #13 by cedar there. The other side also has a mind map, doesn’t bother me if I see notes from the opposite side while reading / writing them.
My conclusion? (your own) Mindmaps are easy to read, so they make good notes. It would be easy to convert the pieces from a mindmap into a memory palace if you want, and to make them work more like a memory palace themselves if you work towards that.
I wouldn’t want to take notes using mindmaps in real time, instead I’d use a lot of seriously condensed words, partial sentences, and arrows pointing to key words.
The doodling is a little more extreme than most notes, because I grew the doodles while watching youtube since the paper was still laying around.