I've done a bachelors degree in electrical & computer engineering, half a bachelors degree in chemistry, a year of grad school, and have been in the workforce now for a few years.
In this time, I have never been able produce legible or useful notes much less come up with a personal note taking system that works for me.
My studying habits in school boiled down to showing up to class and pretending to take notes and then going home to spend hours outlining textbook chapters until I had everything I needed to do well on exams.
At work, I take notes in meetings for the exact same reason I took notes in college - so I won't be judged for not taking notes.
I've had success implementing context managers with page object models when testing with selenium. All page objects assume the same base page (e.g. the home page of the web app) and will return the browser to that page upon exiting the with block. It works really well.