![]() ![]() I’m edging towards a new book, which is pretty formless at the moment, so I need a better solution for keeping my writing ‘chunks’ organised. This approach is fine if you have the overall structure of the book hashed out, but a nightmare if you don’t. For the last four books at least, I gave up on the idea of having a notes warehouse and wrote them directly into my drafts instead. As my database got bigger and bigger, the search function didn’t work as efficiently. Endless ‘upgrades’ to the Evernote interface made it really cluttered, so it was not a nice place to write. I realised Evernote is more like an ideas deep freeze than a Second Brain. But when you write in chunks, you need a digital warehouse or ‘Second Brain’ to keep all the chunks while you decide where they fit in your draft.įorte’s book is great and helped me reassess my note taking strategies. Writing in chunks is a great way to beat perfectionism and avoid an enormous ‘write up’ at the end of a project. ![]() This is the ‘writing chunks, not chapters’ or ‘starting in the middle’ approach, advocated by Pat Thompson, Howard Becker and other writing gurus. I also write around data in the form of images and tables. I write around the quotes I extract, adding and extending the thoughts of others. When you think about it, this practice of annotating other people’s work is the essence of academic writing. It’s basically an online database that enables you to add your own notes to bits of text taken from other’s work. Other than being a subscription service, Evernote is a great tool. Although my system kind of worked (I’ve produced seven books in eight years), I’ve long been dissatisfied with Evernote as a solution because it’s a subscription service that can lock your notes away if you don’t keep paying. Last year I wrote a post inspired by the new book by Tiago Forte called Building a second brain for academic writing which, in part, documented the way I kept my writing notes tidy using Evernote. It’s not an easy task, so I’m always looking for ways to improve my systems, as I wrote about here. For years I’ve been using a combination of Zotero, Pocket, Evernote, and, more recently, a hand written Bullet Journal to organise and transform information and ideas from other people into my own words. I try to concentrate less on filing PDFs and books, and more on making and formatting my own notes. Just like hooch, the quality of the home-brew information management solutions can vary enormously – either bringing joy or slowly killing you.Īs Peg Boyle Single wisely said ‘Collect notes, not articles’. People end up with all kinds of home-brew solutions to solve this epic information management problem. At the same time, you must produce your own words and make sure you don’t accidentally plagiarise other people. Writing a thesis or book is an enormous task that takes years and involves reading hundreds, sometimes thousands, of books, papers and articles. ![]()
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