I love learning, especially on reaching higher levels of performance, but other subjects as well.
However, the problem is that I often find myself taking in too much information and inevitably forget a good chunk of it. This is made even worse when I listen to audiobooks (my primary learning source), where I am typically doing another task simultaneously, and my attention is sometimes divided.
I haven't found a complete solution to this problem, but I've found it very helpful to write down key ideas or takeaways from what I'm learning. This can be just a phrase I heard or even a single word that could spark my memory on the topic. I'll often write these down in my default notes app on my phone, but I find myself never going back to read and review them just because it takes so much time to scroll back.
This is where the whole idea of mind mapping comes in. I'll be honest and admit that I haven't really used the mind mapping technique very much in the past due to how hard it is to get it started. However, as I'm finding my ideas and notes increasing, I want to take advantage of connecting the dots to new ideas.
My current source of building a mindmap is using Evernote's app, a fairly basic note-taking app that syncs across devices and allows you to add tags to the notes. I prefer to use a bigger visual mindmap, but I haven't yet found a good app for that. In the time being, Evernote works really well for writing down my ideas as they come up and quickly tagging them with the corresponding name for future review.
Key takeaways:
1) A lot of what I learn I forget due to the method
2) I can often remember ideas and insights if I only have a few keywords related to it
3) Using a mindmap technique, I can quickly review all related topics and make connections faster