Why You Shouldn't Use Your Laptop to Take Notes in Class

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With all the apps and digital tools available to enhance your studying, plus how fast and easy it is to type notes compared to how long it takes to write them, it seems like a no-brainer to bring your laptop with you to class. But there’s good reason to believe taking notes by hand helps your brain retain more. Here’s why you should try leaving the laptop behind at home and how to make the switch to the old-school way easier.

Digital note-taking isn’t perfect

There’s been plenty of research that has suggested hand-taken notes are superior to those you take on a computer, even though typing is so much faster and you can get more information on the page. Actually, that’s part of the problem: When taking notes by hand, you have to be choosy about what is important enough to write down. You have to use critical thinking, make outlines, and listen closely to determine what parts of the lecture are valuable enough to take the time to jot down. When you’re typing, you can just transcribe the whole lecture in real time if you want—and you might go on autopilot to do so without engaging your brain deeply in the material.

I made this mistake in grad school: I'd type everything the professor said, so focused on getting every word that I didn't actually hear the lesson. Worse, I ended up what amounted to transcripts—and the majority of what the professors would say during three-hour classes wasn't relevant to my concrete learning goals. I'd end up feeding my messy "notes" into AI tools and asking for summaries. I could have just listened more thoughtfully and intentionally the first time around.

Recent research backing up note-taking as the reigning champ was published in Teaching of Psychology in 2022. Researchers put participants in four categories: those who took notes by hand and took a test on the computer, those who took notes on the computer and took a test by hand, those who took notes and did a test on the computer, and those who did it all by hand. Overall, regardless of how they ultimately took the test, the students who took notes by hand performed better on the quiz overall—and better on conceptual questions.

Your computer is distracting

It’s convenient to be able to look up concepts, jot down notes, and maintain tabs of supplemental materials throughout class, but it’s just as convenient to toggle over to a new window and scroll social media or send work emails. Being distracted in class is not helpful for your retention and performance, regardless of whether the tool at hand could help you if you were using it to.

A 2012 survey published in the Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning showed that of 478 students and 36 instructors surveyed at one university, almost half found the use of technology in class for noneducational purposes distracting. There have been a bunch of other studies showing that use of phones or laptops for noneducational purposes during class has a negative effect on academic performance. It's why we're seeing so many jurisdictions around the country push for phone-free school zones for kids. The journal articles on these results have pretty straightforward titles like “Dividing Attention in the Classroom Reduces Exam Performance” and make it clear that doing anything but taking notes or following along with class materials on the computer is only impacting your ability to obtain and retain valuable information.

And since taking notes on the computer isn’t all that great to begin with, you might as well not bring the device at all.

Plan your note-taking

If you've been typing your notes out for years, it will be a major adjustment to go back to the old notebook and pencil. How is your handwriting looking these days? Do you even know? Time to reacquaint yourself, but in the process, you'll need a strategy as you embark on this plan.

There is actually quite a variety of note-taking methods; the best one for you will depend on what type of content you're studying and what kind of learner you are. I linked my guide to all the approaches above. You might find outlining, the Cornell technique, or "mapping" or "charting" to work best, but you'll have to play around with them a while to figure it out.

By the way, just because you take the notes by hand doesn't mean they have to stay hand-written. You can digitize your notes using an app or even invest in a smart notebook that will do it for you as you write. I've used a Rocketbook smart notebook in the past and found it intuitive and a nice way to straddle the analog and digital worlds.

Finally, make sure you revise your notes before you leave class, whenever possible. Going through them while the lecture is still fresh in your mind is crucial. You can either start digitizing them then, maybe by using an app to make a mind map, or just rewrite them on a different notebook page.

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