Writing notes in a structured form is a very good idea - you’re not passively listening and also it’s much much better than reading a script of the listening. Also, good advice from you is picking things to listen to which are personally interesting.

Another extremely important reason for not trying to get/understand everything the first time you listen to something is that often you need to get used to the speaker’s accent, pronunciation, intonation and elocution. You might need to listen more than once to get this - especially when the listening has not been ”specially picked” for your listening level.

It’s important to point out that if the listening is too difficult for you, then it’s better to leave it for later on or even throw it away if you still can’t understand it after a few attempts. This is going to happen often if you are using listenings that you have ”randomly” found on Internet.

What you are perhaps missing is the idea of ”preteaching” vocabulary before actually engaging in listening to a topic. You really need key vocabulary at least at a recognition level in a listening topic before you listen to it - otherwise you will very quickly get lost while listening.

For example, if your listening topic is something like ”A World War 2 Battle in Europe”, you might want to learn about or recognise important words such as ”battle”, ”war”, ”aircraft”, ”bomb”, ”tank”, ”trench”, ”supplies”, ”attack” and so on before listening.

The ways of preteaching such words are numerous. Just to give a couple of the many possible ways of doing this: a discussion with someone who is familiar with the topic and is willing to explain the definitions of words to you when you ask or looking at a picture book with examples of words associated with war. It’s also a very good idea to write down the words you think might be important for what you are going to listen to and what their definitions are.

Preteaching vocabulary in itself is a massive topic, so I won’t go further into all that here