Finals week is close. You have a semester's worth of notes across multiple subjects — some organized, some not — and you need to start active review. The problem is that review from passive notes is inefficient. You read the same lines you've already read and recognize them as familiar without testing whether you actually know the material.

Flashcards work better because they force retrieval practice — the act of trying to recall an answer from a question is more effective for retention than re-reading. The bottleneck is making them. The Notes to Flashcards workflow handles that part.

The Situation

You've been taking notes all semester. They live in a mix of formats — typed DOCX files from your laptop, PDF exports from your note-taking app, TXT files from quick captures. Some notes are well-organized by topic. Others are a stream of what the professor said in the order they said it.

You know you should review. You know flashcards would help. What you don't have is two hours to manually create 80 cards from three weeks of organic chemistry notes before you also need to review the other four subjects on your exam schedule.

The production work — reading the notes, identifying the key facts and concepts, writing a question for each one, and writing the answer — is significant even when you know the material. It's the kind of task where the effort of making the study tool competes with the time available to use it.

The Workflow: Notes to Flashcards

Upload your notes in TXT, PDF, or DOCX format. You can upload notes from a single lecture or an entire semester's worth — the workflow handles both.

The agent reads the notes and identifies three types of testable content:

  • Definitions — a term and its meaning. These become straightforward Q&A pairs: "What is [term]?" with the definition as the answer.
  • Concepts — an idea that requires explanation or understanding beyond a simple definition. These become questions that require a multi-part answer, formatted to give you enough to check your own response against.
  • Facts and relationships — named theorems, historical events, causal relationships, formulas, classifications. These become retrieval questions: "What does [X] describe?" or "What is the relationship between [A] and [B]?"

Each flashcard is organized by topic, following the structure of your notes. If your notes cover three topics in one file, the flashcards are grouped by those three topics so you can study one section at a time or filter by the concepts you're least confident on.

What You Get

A DOCX or PDF document with all flashcard pairs organized by topic. Each card is formatted as a question on one "side" and the answer on the other, in a layout designed for easy conversion into Anki or similar spaced-repetition tools.

If you use Anki, the exported format can be imported directly. If you prefer to study from a document, the layout works for that too — cover the answer column and test yourself down the question column.

A Note on Volume

The agent generates cards for the most testable content — not every sentence in the notes. A typical one-hour lecture worth of notes produces 20–40 cards. A full semester of notes for a single subject might produce 150–300 cards, depending on the density of the material. That's a usable deck, not an overwhelming one.

Inputs and Outputs

Input: Lecture notes in TXT, PDF, or DOCX format. Single lecture or full semester.

Output: A structured flashcard document with Q&A pairs organized by topic (DOCX/PDF).

Estimated time: 2–4 minutes, depending on volume of notes.