Do you enjoy spending hours in the library, sipping drip coffee into the early morning and taking short walks every hour? If so, you can probably achieve your academic goals using any note-taking strategy. On the other hand, if you find studying for courses tedious, then I recommend you toss your existing note-taking approach out the window and utilize concept maps instead. When I was applying for research tech positions, I circled terms, connecting them with labeled lines. After a couple of rereads and sometimes a nap, I found I was able to prepare intelligible commentaries on any topic, including neoplastic transformations, cell physiology, and  the biophysics of lipid-lipid phase separation . In the top image, you can see the kind of note-taking that I did back in college. These notes look very pretty, and they support two conclusions: 1) I had access to excellent coffee and 2) I read the chapter from front to back exactly once. On the bottom you see my current concept-map based app