You've seen them everywhere. The perfectly color-coded Notion databases. The calligraphy headers with exactly five different highlighter colors. The Instagram-worthy desk setups with the matcha latte positioned just so.
And you've probably spent hours—maybe even days—trying to recreate them for your own studying.
Here's the uncomfortable truth nobody on StudyTok wants to admit: your obsession with "aesthetic notes" might be the exact reason you're struggling to remember anything come exam day.
Let me paint a familiar picture. You sit down to study for your biology midterm. You open your notes app, pick the perfect font, set up your headers, choose your color scheme. You start transferring information from your textbook, making everything look beautiful.
Three hours later, your notes look like they belong in a museum. You feel productive. You feel accomplished.
But here's what actually happened: you spent 3 hours doing what cognitive scientists call "shallow processing." You moved information from Point A to Point B while your brain was primarily focused on aesthetics, not understanding.
Research from Princeton and UCLA found that students who take notes by hand remember more than those who type—but only when they're summarizing and engaging with the material. The moment note-taking becomes about making things look pretty rather than understanding concepts, you lose the learning benefit entirely.
Your brain forms memories through a process called encoding. The stronger the encoding, the better you'll remember something later.
Here's what creates strong encoding:
Here's what doesn't create strong encoding:
When you're focused on aesthetics, your brain's working memory is occupied with design decisions instead of content comprehension. You're quite literally using your cognitive resources on the wrong task.
Here's where it gets really uncomfortable.
For many students, creating elaborate note systems is procrastination wearing a productivity costume. It feels like studying. It looks like studying. You can even post it on social media and get validation for studying.
But it's not studying. It's organizing.
There's a crucial difference between preparing to learn and actually learning. Setting up your perfect Notion template? Preparing. Reorganizing your notes by color? Preparing. Actually testing yourself on the material until you can recall it without looking? Learning.
The ugly truth is that real studying often doesn't look pretty. It looks like staring at a blank page trying to remember what you just read. It looks like getting quiz questions wrong and figuring out why. It looks like messy scratch paper covered in half-formed thoughts.
If you want to remember information for your exams, here's what research actually supports:
Active recall over passive review. Instead of re-reading your beautiful notes, close them and try to write down everything you remember. The struggle of retrieval is what builds memory. Yes, it's uncomfortable. That discomfort is learning happening.
Spaced repetition over marathon sessions. Your brain consolidates memories during rest. Studying the same material across multiple shorter sessions beats one long aesthetic note-making marathon every time.
Testing over highlighting. Every time you quiz yourself, you strengthen the neural pathways for that information. Every time you highlight something, you're just... making it a different color.
Messy engagement over pretty organization. Scribbling questions in margins, drawing crude diagrams to connect ideas, arguing with the text—these "ugly" study methods create deeper processing than any color-coded system.
I'm not saying organization is bad. Having a system to find your notes is genuinely useful. The problem is when the system becomes the goal instead of the tool.
Here's a healthier approach:
Spend 10% of your study time on organization. Spend 90% on actual learning activities like self-testing, practice problems, and explaining concepts out loud.
If you want to take clean, organized notes without the time sink, there are tools that can help. Snitchnotes, for example, can take your lecture recordings, PDFs, or any study material and automatically generate organized notes—so you skip the formatting phase entirely and jump straight to actually learning the content. It even creates practice quizzes from your material, which is exactly the kind of active recall that builds real memory.
You know what's actually impressive? Not a perfectly organized Notion setup.
It's walking into an exam confident because you actually understand the material. It's answering questions without that panic of realizing you recognize the information but can't recall it. It's finishing the semester with good grades and free time because you weren't spending 10 hours making notes look Instagram-worthy.
Your notes don't need to be pretty. They need to be useful.
The best students I know have the messiest notes. They have scratch paper covered in diagrams, questions, and connections. They have documents with typos because they were thinking about content, not formatting.
They also have better grades and more free time.
Next time you sit down to study, try this: set a timer for 25 minutes and don't let yourself touch any formatting. No colors. No organization. Just engage with the material—quiz yourself, explain concepts, solve problems.
Notice how uncomfortable it feels compared to making pretty notes.
That discomfort? That's your brain actually working. That's learning.
Stop optimizing for aesthetics. Start optimizing for retention.
Your future self, walking into that exam actually prepared, will thank you.
Want to skip the formatting entirely and jump straight to effective studying? Try Snitchnotes for free at snitchnotes.com—it turns any lecture, PDF, or study material into organized notes and adaptive quizzes automatically, so you can focus on actually learning.
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