Most academics think of notes as being peripheral to the work, but the fact is that your notes are the place where you do most of your work. Your notes serve as extensions of your working- and long-term memory, freeing up head space to focus on what matters for your career. The aim of this course on academic note-taking is to build a daily, systematic note-taking habit to get ideas out of your mind and into a framework for working more effectively with them.

If you’re going to take notes on something, you might as well treat them as important.

Sönke Ahrens (2017)

Course objectives

1. Establish a habit of writing daily notes.
2. Use temporary notes to capture fleeting information.
3. Write literature notes as part of your reading process.
4. Structure projects through notes.
5. Create notes that you will keep for a lifetime.

Most people don’t have a conceptual framework for academic note-taking. In addition, notes are scattered across different apps, Word documents, Google Docs, draft emails, to do lists, project management apps, reference managers, work diaries, and scraps of paper. This fragmentation of your notes is, in a literal sense, also a fragmentation of your thinking.

My notes are where I spend the majority of time in my working day. But, when you don’t differentiate between different kinds of notes, it can be difficult to work with them in different ways. The note you take as a reminder to call someone is different to the note you take in a meeting, which is different to the note that forms the starting point of an article.

Buy this note-taking course and start building a more systematic and rigorous approach to academic note-taking.

* Your account will be created using the email address you provide during checkout.

Course overview