Taking notes

I'm writing a personal "chess manual", a document in which I add notes, in my own words, about the lessons. It's big document, now almost 100 pages, and I'm only on month 6. (Maybe I have to split the document latter if the size will be difficult to handle).

The big question is of course, is this useful?

Science shows writing notes is a good study method. Best is probably write notes with a pencil, but I assume many writes notes in the computer or mobile. I'm not sure if this is a drawback or not for the learning.

But important is to review your notes. I try to review my notes several times, but as my manual gets bigger and bigger, the review takes longer and longer time.

Any thoughts about this?

I'm not big on taking notes for later review. Even back in my college days I would take notes during classes, review them at the end of the day and never look at them again.

But, I am big on making notes when studying difficult material in the form of "mind maps". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map

I mentioned that I was restudying pawn structures which turns out to be more complex than I originally conceived. I am integrating the month two lessons, Marovic, and Sokolov materials to gain a comprehensive understanding. Mind maps are the perfect tool for this type of study. I find that the final map suits me well because I an visually recall what I learned after one or two revisits the the map.

My experience with mind maps was surprising; I am left-brain dominate, but the activity of creating the maps proved to be very effective.