I heard someone describe the process of writing notes as conditioning his mind for the problem space. The first thing he does with any new subject is write down pages of messy notes with no intention of consulting them again. They are just an expendable resource to help get the info into his mind.

I found it really refreshing to approach notes as totally expendable one time things to help memory. In school we were taught to treat them as a well organized, legible reference log and I was terrible at taking them. I wish I had just slammed down everything of relevance with no concern for organizing the info.