Note-taking can help in class or a meeting—and if you do them right, they'll help you afterward as well. Lindsey Ellefson is Lifehacker’s Features Editor. She currently covers study and productivity ...

Have you ever felt like your notes are just a chaotic collection of thoughts, scattered across notebooks, apps, or sticky notes, never quite coming together into something useful, like a second brain?

Laptops are ideal for taking course notes. They’re portable enough to carry with you to every class, they have built-in keyboards and touchpads for fast typing and navigation, you can doodle and ...