Comment by exe34

"Working out on the fly" - I do the same thing, I try to find the minimum I can get away with memory-wise, and try to connect everything else to that in a way I can retrace my steps easily. When I was in school/uni, my notes started out as say 10 pages per lecture, and got thinned down over the months until I only had one page or half a page to memorize on exam day, and everything else could be decompressed from that nugget.