Using Notion to study

Hi, I would like to share how I’ve been organizing and studying for ARE. So far, I’ve done and passed PcM, PjM, CE, and PA using this as my organizational base for studies. I’ve relied on the official books, this forum, the NCARB practice exams, and YouTube videos for content.

I’ve set up a Notion collection of inter-relational databases where I can plan, prioritize, make notes, and track progress on each NCARB division. Those databases relate to each other and cover all NCARB divisions, the canonical books' chapters, and what I call Key Concepts.

Key Concepts are my distilled personal notes on the essential topics within each division. In each topic, I tried to add very concise notes, links to videos, quotes from this forum, and excerpts from books and elsewhere. 

Since Notion provides different ways to see a database, these key concepts can be seen as an overall table, or, for instance, a progression board filtered by division being studied, and sorted by priority and progress.

The Study Divisions Manager is a table where I made a copy/paste from NCARB guidelines divisions explanations, relating each one with the Key Concepts and some of the main book’s chapters. I also put the average number of questions in each division so they can be sorted by relevance, making it easy to see which divisions to focus on and where to study for them.

I've also added a Glossary/Dictionary at the end (not shown here, due to image limits), as I'm not a native English speaker.

The beauty of Notion is that, besides being a notebook on steroids, you can access it everywhere, anytime: Phone, iPad, desktop. Also, the very process of creating this helped me a lot in my studies!

Good luck on your exams!

Divisions manager from NCARD Guidelines, linked to key Concepts and book chapters

Key Concepts as a board, organized by priority and study progression.

Each key concept is a page with notes, links, tables, and excerpts