Tips for focusing on very boring study notes?

The best thing I can recommend is to “do them” again.

Ik Ik what the fuck ew.

But believe me, nothing beats rewriting the notes by hand again and thinking about them while you’re doing it. Why is this stuff important? What are some tie backs you can recall on for this concept? Any funny ideas you came up with that might help you to remember it?

Then, to add another layer, I digitize my notes with Obsidian. It’s a markdown note book that lets you tag stuff and then you can view a graph of the connected pages via the tags you tossed on each one to breeze through notes fast (great for doctorates and heavy degrees, or just stuff you plan on adding onto as time goes on.

It’s all about reanalyzing the material through different ways and angles. Writing stuff down seems to click better for most humans for some reason. You can also try finding some good YouTube content on the material and try challenge problems frequently. Don’t let failing scare you, analyze your failures and study yourself. Getting through school is just as much about learning the material as it is learning about yourself and how you beat perform and learn.

Rewrite it all in your own words. You'll never need to look at the notes again but it will force you to get to grips with the material instead of glazing over.

I would climb to the top of our step ladder, or any safe high place that would trigger my vertigo but lower than where the fear kicks in. Later as an adult when I got diagnosed, I learned that the sense of balance and balancing exercises can help tone down ADHD. I had no idea but I had found a way to do it.

PS any place high up can do, I also loved reading at the top of stairs, of at the top of a hill with a clear view below me. The step ladder was easy to do in my bedroom during the winter.

So what helped me was moving while studying. That's how I passed the Bar exam. What does that mean, multiple things. 1 way that worked was to throw a ball up and down while saying the thing I needed to memorize out loud, extra points if you could do it to a rhythm. 2. I would listen to lectures and talks on the subject while taking a walk. You could either record yourself saying your facts or find a YouTube video on the subject. It might help to hear the info in a different way. 3. Flash cards help so far as letting you know what you don't have memorized yet. 4. Read the info word for word, then repeat as if you're teaching someone the info.

For me moving and saying it out loud helped more than rewriting because I have learned to zone out while I write. As in I can be in a lecture and write notes while also engaging in class in real time because my hand is essentially independent of my brain. What does help writing wise is to do practice questions that way you're rewriting, but also changing the language enough so that your brain doesn't zone out from the repition. Repition is a personal brain killer that my brain will do absolutely anything to avoid.

Make flashcards of short questions + answers from your notes. You can use Anki for that (on Android it's AnkiDroid), and you might want to watch this quick tutorial by Derek Banas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5urUZUWoTLo

One way you can speed up the process of making flashcards is via an AI (not necessarily ChatGPT, I tried Mixtral 8x7b on a few Wikipedia pages and it also works well for this, it's opensource and you have a free demo here: https://huggingface.co/chat/).

You could ask the AI:

Extract a precise and concise answer to the question "[INSERT QUESTION]" from the following paragraph: "..."

The reverse also works:

Formulate a few short questions that are answered by the following paragraph: "..."

I'm using my own offline open source AI. It isn't reliable as a primary source, but it usually helps me work past the dead ends I hit on my own. I wouldn't try to use it cold for something you need right away, but if you have a summer off or some down time, I would start exploring. You need to understand how to communicate directly with an given model. They are all a little different in their nuances, and all require much more open and direct communication than typical human conversation. You need to understand the AI alignment problem as well, so that you are better equipped to spot when it is hallucinating or going off the rails. You need the largest models you can possibly run for general assistant type tasks. It can't give you specific details accurately, but it can explain complex conceptual ideas in unique ways tailored to you specifically. For instance, in computer science, all the processes running on your computer are given CPU time using a Scheduler algorithm. Asking an AI to write a Scheduler, or when certain changes were made to the Scheduler in the Linux kernel is going to generate bad results, but like asking it to help you understand the differences between Fair scheduling and Real Time scheduling would like generate good results. These "good" results are still not primary source quality and should not be trusted directly. However, when I am struggling to understand something like the scheduler, I can ask specific questions about what I am having trouble with and usually figure out whatever details I need in the process. It's like having a really smart friend to talk things out with, but they are not an expert at what it is you're studying.

I always feel this need to make intuitive connections in order to learn, and AI helps me do that. I'm using a 12th gen Intel i7 with 64GB system memory, and a 16GB GPU and running quantized versions of the Mixral 8×7B and Llama2 70B models from huggingface, using Oobaboga Texgen WebUI offline. It takes every bit of this hardware spec to run these very large models offline.

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