Is everything you hear, read or learn in your studies really important? What is essential? What can you leave out? This is often not so easy to answer, because in order to be able to distinguish between essential and non-essential, experience is necessary.
Newcomers to a subject can therefore sometimes be recognized by the fact that they mark a lot in a text, for example according to the motto “everything is important!”. Or they try to learn everything by heart if possible, and then there is a guaranteed threat of information overload. Here it helps to limit oneself rigorously and to mark key terms extremely sparingly.
Ask yourself the question, “In how few words can I reproduce this passage?” Then write these few words on a sheet or in the margin of the study material and try to reconstruct the facts or topic with their help alone. This exercise helps to better recognize what is essential and what can be safely omitted.
By the way:
Information can be reduced particularly well by means of graphic representation of the learning material.
Simply by reducing your learning material to a mind map, a flash card, a learning poster or a diagram, you give more weight to individual pieces of information and can better classify them. A structured presentation, reduced to the essentials, is easier to learn than pure text.
The learning principle must therefore be to reduce what is to be learned to as little information as possible, which can then be easily reproduced.