Academic Note-taking

I used to think that taking notes was peripheral to my work; now I think that notes are the work. 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.

And yet, 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.

Aim and objectives

Build an academic note-taking system that gets ideas out of your head, providing a framework for thinking and working more effectively with them.

The objectives of this course are to:

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.

Course overview