[sj4nz]

If you're not reviewing your notes at least once after you've taken them, you shouldn't even bother taking them. I don't think there are very many exceptions for write-once-and-never-read notes. Note amplification is stronger if your intent is to explain the notes to someone else.

[emilga]

> If you're not reviewing your notes at least once after you've taken them, you shouldn't even bother taking them.

Beethoven would disagree with you,

    Beethoven left behind an enormous number of sketchbooks.
    Yet he himself said he never looked at a sketchbook
    when he actually wrote his compositions. When asked, "Why
    then, do you keep a sketchbook?" he is reported to
    answered, "If I don't write it down immediately I forget it
    right away. If I put it into a sketchbook I never forget it, and
    I never have to look it up again.

Source: http://books.google.no/books?id=1YN3kc31nqAC&pg=PA148&lpg=PA...

[0xdeadbeefbabe]

Jill Price (the Woman who remembers everything)[0] also compulsively kept a journal. What is it about the connection between writing instrument and human brain that doesn't extend to QWERTY? Price also didn't refer back to her journals from what I can tell.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Price

[desipenguin]

This might be of some help : http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/writing-and-re...

[sj4nz]

Yes, he may have disagreed, but most of us aren't savants with a perfect recall strategy such as this because, well, we need the inhibition to support other functions.

[epochwolf]

This is also true for me, I almost always took notes in college but it was rare for me to read them except to retrieve formulas that weren't in the course notes.