Handwritten notes are the best material you have, and the least usable
Writing by hand forces compression — you can't transcribe at speed, so you have to decide what matters — and that is exactly why handwritten notes tend to be better than typed ones. They are also, six weeks later, a stack of paper you cannot search, cannot back up and cannot revise from without reading all of it.
Photographing them into a space fixes the second half without giving up the first. You still take notes by hand, in a lecture, with your brain switched on. They just stop being a dead end.
It reads more than the words
- Your actual handwriting — not a neat sample; the fast, tired, end-of-lecture kind.
- Equations and notation, kept as mathematics rather than mangled into ASCII.
- Diagrams and sketches, described and connected to the surrounding text.
- Structure — the arrows, boxes, underlines and stars you used to mean 'this matters'.
- Photos of a whiteboard, which is the same problem with worse lighting.
What to do with them once they're in
- 1
Photograph the pages
JPG, PNG, WebP or HEIC, straight from your phone. A whole notebook can go into one space.
- 2
Ask them questions
Grounded chat now covers your handwriting, and citations point back at the page — the actual photograph — that an answer came from.
- 3
Drill them
Generate flashcards or a practice quiz from your own notes, which is a much stronger source than a textbook because it is already filtered by what your lecturer emphasised.