My Current Note Taking Routine

I haven't posted in a while because my history research has been put on hold for another project. I'm currently building a website for a future-non-profit I'm building, called Executive Dysfunction Research and Advocacy (Facebook, Facebook Group, Twitter). Basically for the last 5 and a half months I've been neck deep in research papers about Executive Functions, and taking infinite notes and doing a bunch of writing. And someone in a different Facebook group (Ologies Podcast) today asked folks for academic writing advice. I started to answer it over there, until I realized that I should probably just turn it into a proper post here. It took me a couple months to develop this system, but it seems to be working well for me now!

First off, I put the paper into Mendeley and I have been using Microsoft OneNote to take my notes. I have Mendeley downloaded on both my windows computer & my boyfriends Macbook which I occasionally borrow, and I have OneNote downloaded on my desktop, and use it via the browser when I'm on on the Macbook, so I can work from either device, which is nice!

I have different sections for the different executive functions (EFs), and then within each section, I have notes for each source, and I also do my writing drafting in there too.

To be honest, most of my notes at this stage is just me copy/pasting parts I think I may reference or quote later, and putting it into OneNote. I try to bold the parts that will help me quickly see where I should put that bit of text in my note outline later.

After MONTHS of dealing with some papers being horribly formatted so that when I copy/pasted text it included excessive and nonsensical line breaks. For a long time I was using Notepad++. When I pasted something and it looked like that, I would then cut it again, then paste it into Notepad++, then selected all, then ctrl + J to remove the line breaks, then I'd paste it back into OneNote. That's incredibly tedious though, and just last week I found something else instead!

Now, I've installed PDF Copy Paster, and instead of reading within Mendeley itself, I just right click a paper and select "Open File Externally." That opens the pdf with Adobe Reader. Then, when I copy/paste, all the line breaks are AUTOMAGICALLY removed! So, that's a nice time saver. But I still have an unbelievable amount of ex- essive hyph- enizations like this that dr- ive me ban- nanas, but since I don't feel like adding another step to put the text into Word or something and doing a search & replace (does that work if you just want to delete a hyphen and the space after it?), I just suffer with it for now. (And I do mean suffer. UGH the red squiggles make it even worse!)

Anyway, the next step involves another new find of mine, Dynalist. I have folders for each EF, and then a page for each eventual page on the website. I can use bold & check boxes

On each page I start with a general structural outline for the page. Then, after I read each paper (or sometimes after a few), I then put Dynalist on one half of my screen and OneNote on the other, and start copying the text into the outline. I put it in the correct section, and as I find patterns in the notes, or new ideas, I will add new sections to the appropriate pages as needed. I will group quotes into sub-sections based on theme/idea just to make it easier to reference when i get to writing, and to make the notes better managable (as you can collapse sections). So the sub-sub-sections don't necessarily mean they'll have their own bit/section in the writing, it just brings together the bits about the same thing from various sources so I can choose the best quote or better reference the idea when I mention it in the writing (if I do at all).

I don't know if this is the most efficient method or not, but currently, before I start copying my notes over, I type & copy to my clipboard " (1st Author's Surname) ". Then, after I copy the text into the note outline (ctrl + V), I hit (ctrl + shift + v) and then hit the number the author is on (for me it's usually 2). I use ClipX clipboard manager so that I can have multiple things in my clipboard at once. But this way, even if I move the notes around, I never lose the source.

Then, as I write, I keep my screen split between Dynalist & OneNote, and I work from my notes as I go, checking off the ideas/quotes I use. For me and how my brain works, this is working quite well for me so far! If my system changes in the future, I will update here.

Oh and one last thing! I also have been using Focus To-Do as my pomodoro timer. It helps me keep track of the passing of time and thus helps keep me from spending too much time on certain tasks, and reminds me to take small breaks throughout the day so that I don't burn myself out.

Index Card Note-taking System- now with PRINTING!!

A few months ago I was super gung-ho with my new note taking system, but as I have yet vanquished my bad habit of taking far too many notes, and since my hypermobility means that writing is painful for me, I started to burn out.

"If only I could just print out these notes," I thought! Well, since my printer didn't accept note cards, I figured I'd just print out the text (which would save time since I could copy/paste!) and glue them to the note cards, which for some reason I still wrote the topic & citation (number) on.

It worked for a while, until I started getting lazy, and instead of printing and cutting/pasting every time i got a page or two worth of quotes, I started pushing it back further and further...

And now, well, 5 months and 2 moves later, I have a ton of empty-but-cited note cards and only somehow two of the printouts I had made left.

SIGH.

I am full of regret.

But! Now I'm staying with my boyfriend, and his printer CAN print on note cards.

4x6 at the smallest, which complicates things, as all the hundreds of cards that I already have done are 3x5... but what can you do?

(Weep, is the answer.)

Anyway, over the last week I've been figuring out how best to do this new set of note cards, and as of now, I've come up with this.

Subject (in the header)-> More specific subject* 

The quote/thoughts/notes. 

Chicago-style ciation (in the footer)

*(handwritten bc headers have to be the same and I don't want to start a billion new documents)

Now, I know ideally you should only have one fact (or quote) per note card, and many of mine probably have too much info on them, but as of now, I'm just going with it. Hopefully as I continue, I'll get used to paring my chunks of copy/paste down and be better at distilling to the very essence of the facts I want to remember. For now, though, this is fine with me. I'll update as my system evolves!

Summer's over! Time to get back to research!

Now that my son is headed back to school, I have time once again to get back into my research! I moved at the beginning of summer, and I'm about to move again, so I'm reconfiguring my research set up and habits again.

This spring, I wrote out a LOT of note cards. I stopped because my EDS/HSD (a connective tissue condition) means that all the writing is killer on my hands, especially my index fingers, as the pressure from gripping the pen makes the joint hyperextend excessively. 

I tried the PenAgain, which a lot of fellow EDSers use, and was super pleased at first, but after just a couple weeks I realized that:

1. They run out of ink SO QUICKLY
2. It's better than regular pens, but still makes my fingers/hands cramp
3. I take way too many notes (but i'm also probably not going to stop)
4. Sometimes I just really NEED to have multiple copies of the same card to put in different places in my organizational system, but neither my fingers nor my attention span play nicely with that need. 

So, what I really think I need, is a way to print out note cards.

A LOT of them. 

So this morning I've been trying to figure out how I can do just that. 

Articles like this one taught me that, hey! Sometimes regular printers can print on note cards! Including mine! HOORAY!

But, then it says how to print out of Word, which I do not have a functioning copy of. So, after looking up some free word processing software options, I downloaded WPS Office. It does have a page layout template for notecards, but then I realized it doesn't have a citation plugin for my reference manager, Mendeley. So then I downloaded LibreOffice, which is Mendeley compatible... but then I couldn't figure out how to format it to index card size! So, back to WPS Writer I went.

Oh, and somewhere in there I downloaded Zotero and started trying that out, too, since Mendeley wasn't giving me any good options of how to cite The Great Courses lecture I'm currently listening to. Maybe my next post will be about how I manage to get this system working!

Okay, but what the heck do I do with all these research notes?!?!

- me, for months.

I've tried a wiki, which, though it doesn't quite work for the note taking/collecting stage that I'm currently struggling with, I do generally like and will still probably be using further down my workflow pipeline (that is, unless I find a Heurist database more helpful than a straight up wiki for that stage, as this week I've been experimenting with that).

After realizing that it wasn't quite the thing for this stage of the research, I shifted over to Scrivener, where I first basically copied the format of a wiki page with each section getting it's own text (page/note), but allowing for more unstructured info and quotes, etc. But that still wasn't quite what I needed (duh, I say retrospectively.)

Then I found the idea of conceptual matrices (yes I spelled it wrong in Scrivener) that seem to work so well for things that aren't biographical research... I tried those, continuously having to break them down so each page wasn't getting so unwieldy, and so here I am now, with this total mess:

 

#REGRET

So, I've spent waaaay too much time the last couple of days trying to figure out what to do, looking into various possibilities (I do NOT understand how people use Evernote for this, I would simply DIE of overwhelm) (and TiddlyWiki sounded promising, but was super confusing and I gave up on that, too.)

Sooooo, what did I end up with after all this searching?

Why, the very system I was trying so hard to find a digital alternative for, of course!

Index Cards.

Credit goes to Ryan Holiday's Thought Catalog article The Notecard System: The Key For Remembering, Organizing And Using Everything You Read, in which he explains that index cards were:

"... responsible for helping me publish three books in three years, (along with other books I’ve had the privilege of contributing to), write countless articles published in newspapers and websites, send out my reading recommendations every month, and make all sorts of other work and personal successes possible."

Uh, yes please. I would like to have anything approaching that level of productivity!
Okay, okay. I should use the notecard system. But of course I then spent half a day trying to find an explicitly digital-index-card system (Scrivener's not counting bc I need a bazillion cards) because, trees! Hand cramping! Supply costs! Travel! Etc!

NoodleTools, though aimed at k-12 students, seemed pretty close, but then I just gave up. I don't want all my notes in such a closed system, anyway. I should just use the actual, physical cards.

So, I can't afford a printer to just print & paste things onto the cards, and my hand is already aching at the thought of what's to come, but I  know darn well that this is the best possible system that currently exists that works best for my brain.

My brain is weird, you see (I have severe ADHD..) and I really do work better with physical copies of things, though my millennial self generally prefers that which is digital and techie. But, ADHD brains in particular really do need things, especially information, to be "externalized" and physically manipulatable (our working memory is crap).

In fact, I thought to write this post after reading this article by fellow ADHDer Aimée Morrison at Hook & Eye this morning, in which she describes why she uses paper for research notes, which is the same reason physical copies work best for me, too:

For me, paper is visible in very important ways: scale, scope, the gist. How much progress I’m making, how much I have left. Where the holes are, sometimes literally. Paper is a massive memory aid, an externalization of my working memory, all the more crucial the larger or more complex a task becomes. Colour coded sticky notes and pens and paper clips and highlighting–I scan it from above and easily zoom down to what I need.

For me, electronic text is inscrutable and frustrating, like trying to watch a movie in the front row of the cinema with a pinhole camera: I can’t get any sense of scale or make sense of anything, and I get dizzy, to boot. There’s no way I could follow any kind of narrative and it’s a challenge not to barf. All the blue light, not enough screen, too many tabs and open windows and nothing findable. Stress nap!

I found this article to be super validating for me, especially since a few days ago I had already gone ahead and ordered some supplies! Thanks, Aimée! :)


Woops this post turned out way longer than intended, but I realized I should make a record of all the things I looked into first, so I don't forget and do this whole thing over again next year!