How I Use Notion to Create Effective Study Notes
When I first started college at Jindal Global Law School, I knew I needed a system that could handle the chaos of lectures, readings, deadlines, and extracurriculars. That’s when Notion became my academic lifesaver. In this post, I’ll walk you through how I use Notion to create clean, efficient, and deeply personalized study notes that actually help me learn (and survive law school).
1. My Dashboard
The dashboard is where everything begins. From here, I can jump into any course, track assignments, or quickly capture new notes.
It includes:
Quick Capture Section for notes, exams, and assignments
Courses Gallery with status bars for tracking progress
A Calendar Widget for visualizing weekly academic flow
Study Dashboard
2. Course Pages: A Closer Look at How I Organize Subjects
Each course page is designed like a mini control center. Here's a detailed view of my Public International Law course page:
On each course page, I include:
The course title, semester, and schedule
Professor details and email
Course location and meeting times
Direct links to the syllabus and assignments progress
Also, contains the database
This structure helps me keep everything I need in one place and makes it easy to access during lectures or study sessions.
3. Assignments & Exams: Stay Ahead, Not Behind
My assignment tracker (within the course page and also on the Dashboard) helps me manage academic deadlines with Kanban-style progress boards.
Each task moves from Not Started to In Progress and finally Complete. This helps me avoid last-minute cramming and gives me a bird's eye view of my semester.
4. Lecture Notes: Consistent & Searchable
All my notes are categorized by topic and tagged with type (e.g., Lecture, Reading, Notes). Here's how my main notes view looks:
Each entry is date-stamped, labeled, and includes relational links back to its course.
5. Inside a Note: My Go-To Structure
Here’s an example of a note from the "Sources of International Law" lecture:
Each note generally includes:
A summary
Key takeaways
Case references (for law courses)
Personal reflections and related readings
Final Thoughts
Notion isn’t just a digital notebook for me—it's how I manage my entire academic life. It helps me stay on top of law school while also giving me room to reflect and organize thoughts clearly.
If you're someone who juggles multiple courses, deadlines, and mental tabs, I highly recommend trying out a setup like this. Feel free to reach out if you want templates or a walkthrough—happy to help you build your own system!
If you want this template, please reach out to me here: notion@manderna.substack.com