Creating summaries is one of the most time consuming steps of the whole process. But when you focus on mastering the previous steps summarizing can be quite enjoyable and not take you so much time. After all, most people spend hours summarizing the material because they don't know how to properly create summaries, or because they didn't spend enough time reading or they didn't selected the most important material to read, or they just didn't take notes. I see a lot of mistakes being done on this phase, the summary phase of the mistake number one that you should avoid is copying exactly what you just read. So I see a lot of people copying verbatim, the information they read into their summaries. I did this mistake in the past and it costed me a lot of time, energy focus, and it basically doesn't help me at all.

Another reason for not to call verbatim what your sources have is because when you copy verbatim the information that there is in your sources, you're not using your own vocabulary, you're using another person's vocabulary. And so because you're not familiar with it, it will do no good for you, it won't help you to retain the information nor even memorize it. The second mistake I see a lot of people do is to write the same thing over and over and over again. So some people read over and over and over again, which I did in the past. And others write the same things over and over and over again, although this will help you to memorize the material because you're doing it like non stop. It's one of the least important and productive ways to actually memorize and retain the material.

It's very time consuming, it will take you a lot of time. It won't help you in the long term. And yes, you shouldn't be able to memorize a lot of things if you repeat them and you write them a lot of things. But it's not productive, it's time consuming and it should be avoided. So for me, a summary is an explanation of the concepts that I've learned before. So depending on my own goals, my summaries can be quite short or quite big, but they should never be a copy of the sources that I read.

Again, I can't really tell you how many pages your, your summary should have, because it totally depends on your goals. And on the material itself. You should spend a few minutes thinking of how in depth you want to cover the material. And so if you want to go very in depth, you should take more time and more pages to summarize the content, but never copy that information that you previously read. writing his summary won't take you a crazy amount of hours. Because you've already skimmed the content, you read the most important information and you'll have already good notes staked on the material, and so the process will be very effective in quick to go through so you might be asking Why should you create summaries if you already have notes and you read the material, so the first reason is your summaries will be much, much shorter than the sources that you read from.

The second reason is your summaries will be written down with your own words in your own vocabulary, which will increase the retention of the material. And the third reason is because summaries will help you to review everything faster, because your summaries contain only the most important information. So summaries help a lot on memorizing, retaining, understanding the concepts and making everything more digestible and organized. So let's dive in to learn how you can create your own summaries. To create your summaries. You might be asking, should I use a physical notebook or should I use my computer or iPad there's a huge debate on this topic to derive your summaries on a digital format or on a physical notebook.

When you use a computer. It's much faster to take your notes. It's also easier to go back and edit things, add more stuff and format the text at headlines and things like that. You can also sync your files in different devices and organize many different sources on the same document. When you use a physical notebook, it's easier to draw things the way you want to. It's better if you're studying maths and the feeling of writing in paper might be a little bit more pleasant and enjoyable for most people.

According to some research, people who take notes on paper are more capable to recall information Half an hour later. This happens because when people write in their computers, they have the tendency to write more than they should, which means they add more information that's not that valuable. And so they might end up coping the sources without really paying attention to what they are writing. On the other hand, it might take you much more time to write summaries on a paper notebook on a physical notebook because it just takes a lot more time to write on To finish my advice is choose the method that you feel most comfortable with. Don't be afraid to try different methods and see which one works best with you. But make sure your main goal is retention and understanding of the material, you should consider both options depending on your goals.

So maybe if you're studying maths, it might make much more sense for you to use a physical notebook. I usually create my summaries in paper notebooks, when I'm having like technical subjects like maths and accounting, but I prefer to use my computer in non technical stuff in subjects that have a lot more theory and sources to check. The worst method to writing your summaries is not using any method at all and not creating the summaries. So pick one or try with different ones. See which method works best what works better with you and don't waste too much time thinking about it and pondering if it's better or if it's not better now the first thing to have In your summary is the main topic, I use the top of my page to write the main topic of the thing that I'm studying, and I immediately follow it with a subtopic.

Below the topics in times I write a short description or a short explanation of the topic. And right above this sub topic, it's important to break each main topic into multiple subtopics. To make the content more digestible and easy to learn. Because you already skim the material, read it and took notes on it, you can basically divide a topic into multiple subtopics that you can use your sources to check which subtopics might be useful to cover on your summary. Next thing you should do is to write a very short explanation of each sub topic. This can take you only a short paragraph, but maybe it can also take you multiple ones depending on the complexity of the subtopic.

There's no right or wrong lens, but each paragraph should only contain one main idea. So if you have more ideas to cover, use another paragraph to do it. So start by writing what you remember about that subtopics. Using your head, your brain and not checking anything. Try to remember ideas, facts, examples, and things that you previously read and take into notes on can write this information in a bullet point format. If you are using a physical notebook, make sure you leave some blank spaces between the lines, so you can then add more information only after trying to recall the information by yourself.

You should then check your notes. Check the sources if it's necessary to complement the information you wrote. But remember to use your own vocabulary to maximize retention using words that are not familiar to us is probably not a good option. If there's any topic that you already know very well. There's no need to waste time writing in in your summaries doesn't make sense to write things that are already obvious. In that are already a part of your knowledge.

As an example, if you're studying and learning the capitals of the countries of the world, it doesn't make sense to add your country in the capital of your country or other countries that you already know the answer. Again, some subtopics contain more subtopics inside it, which we can call sub sub topic is the same framework. So write the sub sub topic, and then an explanation of it. I usually use a red pen for this topic, and then a green one for the sub sub topic, but you can choose Of course, your own color code. So in the previous framework to create your summaries, you basically wrote the main topic, then an explanation, then district topic and next villain nation and the process continues. There's another approach that I like to use depending on my goals, which is the question the answer and the conclusion or the summary.

Basically, you come up with a lot of questions related with the topics that you are studying and you search for answers to those questions in your mind. You then you can then check your sources and your notes to see if they are okay. And you end up writing a short conclusion or a short summary that answers to the question. But make sure you write that conclusion using your own words. The conclusion should not be something very big, it should be an answer to the question in a very simple way. And so after this method, you will end up with a lot of questions and the answer to those questions very simplified and compact.

So basically, after creating those memories, you can use the questions and the answers to create your note card system to remember and recall the information later. By trying to associate the information into a question answer framework. You are summarizing the material in a very efficient way. And this is especially important if you're going to be tested on The material you are learning. This is very similar to the Cornell Method when taking notes, but it's usually done with more accuracy and precision because you have now a clear picture of the subject because you already skimmed the material, read it and took notes on it. As you can see, all phases of the studying process are important and they are all related with each other.

And so for me, in my opinion, what really differentiates a good study process from an incredible study process is that each phase invert incredible study process is done separately to make every aspect of it very effective. When you don't go through the reading phase, you end up reading a lot of information that it's useless when you don't take notes after reading. You don't make the concept stick in your mind in when you don't take the time to create proper summaries. The process of memorizing and recalling the information will be much more difficult to go through more boring and time consuming