Head Space

Calm productivity for academics

Tag: note-taking

  • You’re saving everything and finding nothing—here’s why

    Your research is scattered across browser bookmarks, note apps, screenshots, and email drafts. When you need information, you can’t find it. The solution isn’t better organisation within each platform—it’s refusing to use multiple platforms. One capture method, one structure, for every source format you encounter.

  • Avoid information overload with an effective knowledge cycle

    A systematic knowledge cycle helps academics transform information overload into meaningful scholarly output. The process involves purposeful capture, regular processing, deliberate connection-making, and consistent creation. Rather than processing everything perfectly, this approach converts selected information into valuable insights through intentional research, note-taking, and writing practices that compound over time.

  • Types of notes

    Knowing about the different types of notes you’re taking helps inform your approach to note-taking in general.

  • Intentional note-taking: Moving from capture to curation

    Discover why intentional note-taking is crucial for meaningful academic work. Learn how being selective about what you record can create space for deeper engagement with ideas that truly matter, and explore practical steps for moving beyond comprehensive capture to more purposeful documentation practices.

  • Use a weekly review to close open loops

    As academics, we carry countless mental threads throughout our week — unfinished tasks, half-formed ideas, looming deadlines, and scattered notes. Left unattended, these “open loops” consume valuable mental bandwidth, even during times when we should be resting and recharging. Every Friday afternoon, I dedicate time to what might be my most valuable productivity ritual: the…

  • Note-taking intent

    Note-taking is an important part of knowledge work and, while it’s important to think about where and how you take notes, it’s much more important to think about what you’re going to do with them.

  • Expanding a note stub into a permanent note

    In this video I walk through the process of taking a note stub (i.e. a “dump” of content) and expanding it into a more comprehensive and useful permanent note.

  • Note-taking with Hypothesis and Zotero

    In this short video I demonstrate a strategy for note-taking with Hypothesis and Zotero while reading on the web. I try to show the early stages of creating links between ideas that I’m interested in, and eventually where I add those ideas into my permanent notes. One of the challenges of being an academic is…