If you want to ‘jazz up’ your study notes and find a new way of studying then try jumping on the colour-coded notes hype! Colour-coded notes are a great way to make your studies more fun and engaging whilst still getting everything done that needs to be revised. This method is great if you are wanting to try something to help you study but you are unsure where to start.
Importance of Color-Coded Notes
Color-coding is an exciting way of learning and then storing the knowledge that you need to understand. These type of notes will help you revise and evaluate crucial information. Using bright colours encourages you to focus your attention and helps you to pick out important ideas. It is a great way to learn and revise for visual learners who sometimes struggle with lots of words and long sentences.
Make it less boring
It might be tedious to take notes that need your whole attention and focus. Just rewriting out sentence after sentence can be a very boring way to learn. Eventually you will lose focus! Making notes is a time-consuming and often repetitive process. However, utilising colours to highlight key aspects or areas of the subject you’re studying might boost and improve your interest in the method, makes it less unpleasant for you.
It is well known that utilising colours to organise your notes encourages the creative part of your mind to pay more attention. Color-coded notes help identify one subject from another and make the notes more aesthetically attractive and appealing to look back over! They have a distinctive appearance and are simpler to remember.
Psychology behind colour-coded notes
There have been lots of studies conducted around using colour to study. The outcome of these studies have show that certain colours can be linked to certain functions in the brain. Using colour is thought to aid in retention of information. The idea is that you associate a colour with a topic and categorise your notes into these colours making it organised in your head.
Using Jamworks notes
Jamworks is a great help if you are a visual learner but want to stick to note-taking online instead of paper. By using Jamworks you are able to highlight, summarise and revise from your notes. This helps to make your notes more manageable and highlights the most important parts that are worth taking extra note of.
Prioritise a specific topic and highlight all the relevant sections. The great thing about Jamworks is that you can then turn your notes into flashcards!
Find out more about Jamworks assisted note taking here.
How to colour code your notes
Make sure you have all the right tools handy when you sit down to start colour-coding. The best thing to do is to have different colour pens, different colour highlighters and post-it notes if you want to go that extra mile. The great thing about using stick notes is that nothing is permanent so you can rewrite and replace the notes.
Before you even start to write your notes you will need to come up with a code and a plan. Are yoy going to use coloured pens or coloured highlighters, or both? Define what your main topics are, I would keep this to 3/4 topics, and dedicate a topic to a colour. Make this code at the top of your page so you can always remember it.
Something I like to do is to write my notes in black or blue, use a highlighter to colour code it, and then add extra notes with post-its. This would be things like top tips, or important information.
Use of post it notes
If you want to make extra good use of the idea of colour-coding, then have a go at introducing post it notes into your system. Post it notes are also a great way to organise your notes strategically and effectively. Word of advise though don’t buy cheap post it notes, they always seem to fall off and you just know they will fall off one of the important pages. Therefore it is best to spend a little bit extra and get yourself some proper post it notes that you can trust to stay to sticky.
Top Tips:
Once you have your plan ready on how you are going to colour-code your notes, follow these tips below to make sure you are successful in your studies.
Be consistent
Make sure you stick to your colour code and don’t change it up. By sticking to the same colours for each set of notes, you will become used to categorising a piece of information based on its colour. As mentioned previously, this is great if you are a visual learner.
Limit your colours – don’t overdo it
Colour and highlight the areas that are most essential to remember. So, remember to use a restaurant while generating color-coded notes and avoid overdoing it. When creating color-coded notes, it is critical to remember not to overcomplicate the technique of incorporating colours in your revision notes. Too much colouring makes the notes seem scary and confusing which defeats the point of writing notes in the first place. Just focus on the areas of high importance and limit the number of colours you are using to avoid this problem.
Final Thoughts
Colour-coded notes isn’t for everyone so do not worry if it isn’t working for you! An important thing to remember when using this method is to not let yourself get carried away with the colours. Try not to spend ages making your notes look colourful and pretty as you can be wasting precious time!
