u/Business_Party_333

Last semester I was studying for my exam almost entirely through YouTube.

Karpathy's neural network series. MIT OpenCourseWare. 3Blue1Brown. Hours and hours of content.

Here's the problem: my actual study workflow looked like this —

1. Play video
2. Hear something important → pause
3. Alt-tab to Notion → type half a sentence
4. Forget the context → rewind 20 seconds
5. Play again → lose focus because I'm thinking about the note I just wrote
6. Repeat 150 times per video

I timed myself once. For a 45-minute lecture I spent 1h 40 minutes actually "studying" it, and retained maybe 40% of what was said.

The issue isn't the content. The issue is that the human brain can't simultaneously watch, listen, understand, and write at the same time. Something always gets sacrificed. Usually it's understanding.

Does anyone got any advices ?

I've been trying to learn coding for the past few weeks and my workflow was a mess.

I'd pause every 30 seconds, alt-tab to Notion, type a half-baked sentence, lose the thread of what was being explained, rewind, pause again… repeat 200 times per video.

At some point I realized I was spending more time managing my notes than actually understanding the content.

Does anyone knows some apps or website that could help me whit this?