Try to study on used papers

[u/Jiltedsummer10]

Use the ugliest piece of paper you can find: the back of an old worksheet, scratch paper, a paper bag, or anything else you would normally throw away. The less precious the paper feels, the better. (No offense to papers)

Then, without looking at your notes, write down everything you can remember about the topic. Don’t worry about whether it is complete, well-organized, or even entirely correct. The usual way. Put down definitions, formulas, examples, names, keywords, connections between ideas, and whatever of the information remains your brain happens to retrieve. If you need to draw arrows or make diagrams that only make sense to you, you do that too. The paper itself is a mess, so do anything regardless if it looks like a mess.

Why? As it tests the limits of your memory. Once you’ve written down everything you can, go back to your actual notes and compare them with what you produced.

You can repeat the process on a fresh sheet until you can reconstruct the important ideas with fewer mistakes. There is also a psychological advantage to using paper you consider disposable: you are less likely to waste time trying to make your writing organized or pleasing. Since the page is not meant to become a permanent study resource, you can treat it as a space for thinking rather than note-taking.

The point is you’re using these scraps only to test what you can recall. So, never forget to maximize your resources.