If you have ADHD, recording lectures helps for one main reason: you no longer have to listen, understand and write at the same time. You listen in the room and do the rest afterwards, at your own pace, with the text in front of you. It only works if the “afterwards” actually happens, so most of this guide is about the review routine, not the recording.
This is a study method, not medical advice. If attention problems are affecting your degree, talk to your doctor and your university’s disability services, who can offer more than a recorder.
The routine in one paragraph
Get recording approved (as an accommodation or by asking the lecturer), record each lecture on your phone placed near the speaker, and keep light notes with a mark wherever something sounded important. Within 24 hours, turn the recording into text, read the summary, search the transcript for the marked parts, definitions and numbers, and write three to five questions the lecture answers. That review takes about 20 minutes per hour of lecture. Once a week, answer last week’s questions from memory. Without the 24-hour review, recordings pile up into hours of audio you will never replay.
Step 1: get permission the right way
You have two routes:
- As an accommodation. In the US, colleges handle this through the disability services office (sometimes called accessibility services). You register, provide documentation, and recording is listed in your accommodation letter, which professors then follow. In the UK, recording lectures is commonly agreed as a reasonable adjustment through your university’s disability or student support team. This route means you don’t have to negotiate with each lecturer.
- By asking. Many universities allow recording for personal study, and many lecturers say yes if you ask at the start of term. Some courses ban it.
Either way, the recording is for your own study. Don’t share it or post it. Read your agreement too: some colleges’ accommodation terms forbid uploading recordings to any outside service, including AI tools, without the lecturer’s written consent. If yours does, ask before you put a recording into a transcription tool. Our guide on how to record lectures covers the rules in more detail.
Step 2: set up so the recording is usable
- Phone near the voice. Front row or on the lecturer’s desk if they’re fine with it. Distance hurts audio quality more than any app does.
- Do Not Disturb on. A call can stop the recording on some phones.
- One file per lecture. Rename it straight away: course, week, topic. “Recording 47” is how recordings get lost.
- Light notes anyway. Write headings and board content, and put a star or ”!!” in your notes when something sounds important. Writing a little helps many people stay with the lecture, and the stars tell you where to look later.
Step 3: the 24-hour review (about 20 minutes)
This is the part that turns a recording into learning. Do it the same day or the next, in one short block. A timer helps: 20 minutes is easier to start than “review the lecture”.
- Turn the recording into text. Replaying audio at 1x is the slowest way to review. A transcript lets you skim and search. On iPhone 12 or newer, Voice Memos transcribes recordings in 10 languages, including English, for free. For long lectures, other languages or a summary, upload the file to a transcription tool.
- Read the summary first. It gives you the shape of the lecture in a few sentences. Those main points become your headings.
- Search, don’t read. Look up the parts you starred, plus words like “important”, “remember”, “key”, “exam” and “definition”. This is a scan, not a re-read of 8,000 words.
- Write 3 to 5 questions the lecture answers, with short answers underneath. That page is your revision note.
- Stop. The transcript stays as an archive you can search later. You don’t need to process all of it.
If you miss the 24-hour window, don’t try to catch up on a backlog in order. Do the most recent lecture first, then work backwards only for topics on the next assessment.
Step 4: once a week, test yourself
Take last week’s questions and answer them without looking. Wherever you can’t, go back to the transcript, find that part (search makes this a minute, not an evening) and fix the answer. Testing yourself is one of the best-supported study techniques: rereading notes feels like studying, answering questions is studying.
What tends to go wrong
- Tuning out because “it’s recorded”. The recording is a backup, not a replacement for being there. Light notes keep you present.
- Recording debt. Ten unreviewed lectures feel too big to start, so none get reviewed. Fix: review only the newest one, today, for 20 minutes.
- Replaying instead of reading. Listening again at 1.5x still takes 40 minutes per hour and is easy to drift away from. Text is faster and searchable.
- Over-engineering the system. Colour codes, three apps and a template for every course make it harder to start. One recorder, one transcription step, one page of questions per lecture.
Where Braindump fits
We make Braindump, a voice notes and transcription app, so weigh this section accordingly. For lectures, the useful part is the web tool: upload a lecture recording from your laptop or phone browser, choose the language it was taught in (59 languages), and you get the full transcript in paragraphs, a title and a short summary to start your review from. You can export it as PDF, Word or TXT. If there’s a Q&A, speaker labels separate the voices.
The free plan is 3 transcriptions a day, files up to 2 hours. A lecture longer than 30 minutes comes back as a free preview of the first 5 minutes; the full transcript of a long lecture needs Pro. Our ADHD page covers the app side, for catching thoughts rather than lectures. What it doesn’t do: it doesn’t record in the browser (record on your phone first), it doesn’t make flashcards and it doesn’t give timestamps for every line. For turning the transcript into study notes step by step, see how to turn a recorded lecture into study notes.
The short version
Get recording approved, record with the phone close to the lecturer, star the important parts in light notes, and review within 24 hours: transcript, summary, search, 3 to 5 questions, 20 minutes. Once a week, answer the questions from memory. The recording is only useful if it becomes text you actually look at.