What is Notes?
Notes is your personal space in Pastest to capture learning points as you study.
As you work through questions, explanations, and learning content, you can create sticky notes to record:
- Key concepts
- Things you want to remember
- Mnemonics, heuristics, or reminders
- Your own explanations, in your own words
These notes are saved automatically and appear in Notes, which sits on your homepage, and persist across sessions until you choose to remove them.
The goal is simple:
keep your learning and your thinking in the same place.
And remember – you can still access all your current exams from Study!
Why use Notes?
Many learners understand something on screen, then:
- Write it down on paper
- Open Notion or another app
- Tell themselves they’ll remember it later
Notes removes that friction.
With Notes, you can:
- Capture insights in the moment
- Avoid switching tools or breaking focus
- Build a personal bank of learning points over time – they won't disappear unless you remove them!
Instead of Pastest being just somewhere you practice questions and read concepts, it becomes a place where your own thinking lives alongside your learning.
How Notes fits into your study flow
- You study as normal in Pastest
- You spot something important or worth remembering
- You create a sticky note – you can highlight some of our learning content first to use it in your note if you want to!
- That note is saved to Notes
Over time, Notes becomes a reflection of:
- What you’ve learned
- What you found difficult
- What matters most to you
Creating a note
You can create a sticky note in two ways.
1. From Notes
You can create a note directly inside Notes at any time.
This is useful when you want to:
- Plan your revision
- Jot down ideas or reminders
- Organise thoughts outside of a study session
2. From a study session
You can also create notes while studying — for example from:
- Question explanations
- Textbook topics
- Any other Pastest learning material
When you’re in a study session, you can highlight key learning points and add them straight into a sticky note, alongside your own thoughts and explanations.
This allows you to capture important ideas in context, without breaking focus or switching tools.
Typical ways you might use Notes
- Jot down a learning point from an explanation
- Highlight a key sentence and save it into a note
- Summarise a concept in your own words
- Capture a mistake you don’t want to repeat
- Create a checklist of things to revise
Formatting your notes
While editing a note, you can type / to open the command menu and quickly add:
- Bulleted lists
- Numbered lists
- Checklists
This makes it easy to structure your thinking — whether you’re breaking down a concept, listing revision tasks, or tracking areas to revisit.
Once created:
- The note is saved automatically
- It appears in Notes
- It stays there until you remove it
Using labels to organise your notes
You can add labels to any note to help categorise and find it later.
Labels might include:
- Exam (e.g. MRCP Part 1, PACES)
- Specialty (e.g. Cardiology, Neurology)
- Topic (e.g. Heart failure, ECGs)
- Personal tags (e.g. Weak areas, Revise again)
Filtering by label
In Notes, you can filter by labels to show only the notes that matter right now.
For example, you can:
- View only Cardiology notes while revisiting this specialty
- Filter to exam-specific notes close to exam day
- Surface notes tagged as weak areas or priorities
This turns Notes from a simple collection of ideas into a focused revision tool you can return to when you need it most.
Managing your notes
In Notes, you can:
- View all your saved sticky notes in one place
- Move notes around to organise your thinking
- Edit the text inside a note
- Add or update labels
- Remove notes you no longer need
There’s no “right” way to organise Notes — it’s intentionally flexible so it can adapt to how you think and study.
When should I use Notes?
Notes is most useful when you want to:
- Slow down and internalise something you’ve just learned
- Turn passive reading into active learning
- Keep track of insights across multiple study sessions
If you’ve ever thought “I should write that down”, Notes is designed for that exact moment.
Need a starting point?
If you’re not sure how to begin, we’ve put together a few Notes templates with example structures and prompts to help you get going, including:
- Surviving and thriving at medical school
- A 12-week exam revision plan
- Foundation portfolio management
These are just ideas — feel free to adapt, ignore, or remix them to suit how you study.