381: How to Build a Flexible Note-Taking System for Academic Reading

381: How to Build a Flexible Note-Taking System for Academic Reading

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[00:00:00] I'm gonna bet that you clicked play on this episode because you're a student or an academic who has been tasked with reading and you're having a hard time with one or more of the following. Maybe you feel like you're reading too slowly, or maybe you keep forgetting what you read, or maybe you're spending hours highlighting articles only to realize a week later that you can't remember a thing that you read.

If that's you, then you're at the right place. After spending over 400 hours coaching grad students and professionals, I've noticed that a lot of us are trying to get work done with systems that don't quite work for us. In this case, I'm specifically talking about note-taking systems. In today's episode, I'm gonna talk about how having a note-taking system that reduces unnecessary cognitive load, that helps you retrieve information later, and that works with your brain can make a huge difference in helping you learn [00:01:00] and get through the many hurdles that come with grad school and your career.

Welcome to the award-winning Grad School Femtoring Podcast, the place where first-generation BIPOC students and professionals can listen in on inclusive grad school stories and gain practical tools for sustainable success. This is Doctora Yvette Martinez-Vu, a certified coach, consultant, author, and speaker.

I will be serving as your femtor, providing you with insider knowledge to help you thrive in grad school and beyond.

Welcome back everyone to another episode of the Grad School Femtoring Podcast.

This is your host, Doctora Yvette. In today's episode, [00:02:00] I will cover why so many academic reading systems don't quite work for us, how to build a flexible and efficient note-taking system that supports your brain. It supports with planning, with organizing, and with retaining information later. And I'm going to share a few ways to adapt your note-taking system, specifically if you're someone who's neurodivergent, if you're dealing with chronic illness, or if you just have so much on your plate right now that you're noticing a lot of fluctuating capacity.

We'll talk about that too. Let's start with why reading can feel overwhelming. If you are a grad student, you got to this point, like you did really good in school. You finally got to this point in your higher ed journey, and you've got your coursework, you've got a lot of readings, and it can feel really frustrating that you are in your program, and there's this assumption that you [00:03:00] should already know how to read academic journals.

And that means that if you're not one of the lucky ones who developed this skill set early on, no one is necessarily going to teach you what to read, how to read, what deserves your attention when you're reading, how many details to be jotting down, how to organize all the literature, how to make it legible enough for you so that you can understand and retrieve the information months or even years later.

And yes, this happens. You can get through college, you can get through grad school, you can get through one or more careers without having learned certain skills. And if that's true, that's okay. But I just wanna say that sometimes what ends up happening is a lot of us will just lean on our old habits.

Oh, we're just gonna highlight everything, or we're gonna save PDFs everywhere or in the easiest place. Maybe that's just your main desktop on your computer. [00:04:00] Or maybe you are trying to make an effort of storing them somewhere, but you're putting them in inconsistent or hard to find places. Maybe you're annotating in different ways every single time.

You're trying to do it in a different way. And so there's, again, no clear system that brings everything together. And then when it's time for you to go back to those readings, you might feel like, "Wait, did I even read them at all? I don't remember much of this information." And you can't recall or lean on your memory alone, so then you find yourself having to reread more material than you hoped.

I say all of this because I've been there and done that. I was once a grad student. I am now a working professional. I still do a lot of reading on my own, and I know what it feels like to go through this cycle of reading. Then doing some inconsistent note-taking, then forgetting what you read, and [00:05:00] then rereading, which creates an unnecessary and huge amount of mental effort.

And so this is why I'm talking about why note-taking should function as your external memory system. It should be a system that you can rely on beyond just your own memory. It should be something that reduces your friction, not just now, but also for your future self. You wanna be kind to your future self and think, "Wait, would this make sense to me months later or even years later?"

So let's talk about what good notes actually do. And what do I mean by good notes? I mean just a way for you to record what you read that will help you gain the information that you need later on. This can include you answering practical questions later, like, "What was this paper about? What was the main argument or the main research [00:06:00] question or questions?

Why did I save it? Do I have a citation for this? How does it connect to my work? Where should I cite it? Have I saved any relevant quotes from this? Do I even agree with it? What does it contribute to the conversation? How is it in conversation with me and my work? Do I need this for my literature review?

If so, have I written a one-paragraph summary of this reading?" You are not trying to document everything about the article, but you are trying to gather just enough information so that in the future you'll remember the important details without having to start from scratch. So this is where you've gotta ask yourself, "What questions do I need to answer in my notes to help me summarize, organize, and gather information that supports my learning and my research projects?"

So that could be any of the questions I mentioned [00:07:00] earlier. That could be other questions. You could lean on peers or on mentors if they're helping you with a project and ask them, "What is it that you expect me to retain from this reading?" Or, "Do you have any recommendations for the type of information I should be saving from this reading?"

All of that will help you to then come up with your own custom template of all the questions you're trying to get answers for every time you do your reading. And if you centralize that so that each reading goes through that template, you're gonna be in a really good spot later on when you're trying to access the information.

And this brings me to my next point, which is that you need to have and build a centralized system. You want your information to be all in one place. This is especially helpful if you're someone who is preparing for qualifying exams, if you're working on writing a dissertation, or you've got a book project.

You don't want all of your [00:08:00] notes scattered across random notebooks or half-finished documents, screenshots, email drafts to yourself , sticky notes. You name it, I've heard of them all, including the PDFs that are named Final Final Version of X. You don't wanna do that. Instead, create a system where it's easy for you to know where everything lives.

And I know a lot of people tell me, "How do you do it?" Because they want to do what I do. I'm happy to tell you what I do, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily going to work for you. I'll tell you that when I had qualifying exams, what I found really handy and useful, and I'm glad that I did this early on, was that I had everything in a Google document, all of my notes from all of my coursework, from all of my academic readings.

And so it made it relatively easy for me to scan the information. [00:09:00] I also had a reading annotations template, and funny enough, it's the same one that I share with my own one-on-one clients to this day with the set standard questions I answered for every single reading. And so having a Google Doc with a template of questions to answer for all of my readings early on helped me to better prepare for my qualifying exams.

You don't have to do it like that, though. I've seen individuals who have worked well with keeping all of their notes from their readings in a massive spreadsheet. I've also seen people use Word documents. Now, Google Documents allows you to add tabs, so some people put all their readings in one document, but with multiple tabs within that doc.

I also know a lot of folks who like to handwrite their notes, or they still print out their readings. They still write in the margins. They still highlight information. They might have a dedicated notebook for each reading list, or they may have a dedicated notebook for specific [00:10:00] chapters. I still handwrite some information myself, too.

To this day, I have dedicated notebooks for different types of notes. So all of this to say that there is no one correct method. There is no, quote-unquote, "right way" to do this. The way that you know that it's right for you is if your system is searchable or scannable, if it's relatively organized, and if it's easy for you to go back and revisit the information.

So whatever format you choose, again, make sure that it allows you to find the reading, it allows you to understand the reading, and it allows you to use the reading later on.

If you're feeling stuck in grad school or navigating a major professional transition, personalized coaching from a certified coach can make a meaningful difference. I offer one-on-one coaching for first gen and/or BIPOC graduate students and professionals who want structure and compassionate support [00:11:00] while working toward important goals.

Together, we can create action plans that align with your capacity, your responsibilities, and your long-term vision. Clients often come to coaching when they are preparing for major milestones like qualifying exams, defending a proposal, finishing dissertations, exploring new career paths, or building sustainable systems that work for them.

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Now I wanna talk about some flexible or multimodal ways to do this, because sometimes reading or writing your notes can be hard, [00:12:00] and you might need new and different ways to do it.

If you're someone who finds it hard to read text, or maybe you're dealing with symptoms that are making it hard for you to focus on reading, or even, you know, in my case, I know that one of my chronic illnesses affects my eyes, and so I experience a lot of blurry vision, and that makes it hard for me to read for extended periods of time.

And by reading, I mean, like, reading books and reading text. And so if you are someone who finds it hard to read the text consistently, you could lean on text-to-speech tools. That's an accessibility option available in a lot of different PDF readers or Word documents. You can print a copy if you're someone who is more of a tactile person and you like to read something that's printed.

That can be helpful for some. I also know of individuals who use AI tools [00:13:00] like NotebookLM that will help you to turn an article into a podcast-style summary, so you can listen to the article. It also will turn your reading into a visual concept map, and for my visual learners, that can be really handy or helpful.

If you're someone who's struggling with the note-taking, you can use a PDF annotation software, or you can use an annotation tablet. One of my clients recently told me that he's using a reMarkable, which is a really cool tablet that lets you annotate readings. I personally have not used it, but it seems really, really neat, and if I was actively reading a lot of academic articles, I might consider that as an option, as a tool.

I might make that investment. You don't need fancy tools, though. Again, I always wanna stress that. You could take voice notes with most computers or most phones nowadays and [00:14:00] then pull that transcript and save it in a way that's easy to find later. A lot of people I know, will use that as a tool when the sitting down and writing can feel really cognitively draining, or maybe they're doing other things, and so it's easier for them to just do a voice memo or even have a conversation with someone else about the reading because they find it more effective to teach it, and that's a way that they retain the information.

So these are all just different options, and I say this because your note-taking system shouldn't assume that you learn and you process information the same way as everyone else around you, the same way with writing out your notes. It doesn't have to be the same way as everyone else. Test things out yourself, and I don't say this in a way where I'm encouraging you to have a million different types of note-taking systems.

You wanna test things out enough, at least to the point where something [00:15:00] feels like it's good enough. And if your current system is good enough, that's great. If it's not, which I suspect it isn't, that's why you're listening to this episode, I want you to just figure out for yourself what method of reading, what method of annotating will help you to better understand and retain the material.

And keep in mind that the more ways you can access the material, the more likely your system will work on both easier and harder days. And so I'm thinking here about the example of, let's say you have a centralized way of saving your notes. That's really great. But maybe you're having, low energy day, and it's harder to read information.

So instead of reading, you're gonna be listening to the article this time, and then still leaning on your centralized system of note-taking to jot down notes based on what you're hearing from having the reading out loud to you. So there's multiple ways to access information. [00:16:00] Make sure you have some flexible options because that flexibility is gonna help you, especially if you are dealing with energy issues, attention and focus issues, chronic illness symptoms, and these things can fluctuate all the time.

A good note-taking system should also support your current circumstances in other ways. So if you're preparing for qualifying exams, you may need a system that makes it easy to compare sources across themes, across authors, across debates. If you're working on a book project, you may need a system that helps you gather notes by chapter, or by concept, or by a recurring argument that you're making.

And if you're someone, which a lot of people I work with are dealing with this, feel like so many of us are just having... we're just having a hard time, right? We're balancing work. We're balancing caregiving. We've got our own health needs to worry about. Maybe [00:17:00] you're dealing with brain fog. Whatever the stressor is that's going on in your life, you want your system of reading and note-taking to not be another stressor.

You want it to feel easy, and it doesn't have to be the fanciest system. You just want it to be easy enough that you can access it, you can use it over, and over, and over again.

The other thing I wanted to say is that if you're having a really hard time with your reading process, with your note-taking process, it could also be a good time to reach out to someone, whether it's campus support or a qualified professional or a coach, so that they can help you with doing this work.

I do this with my own clients as well, so it's just something worth thinking about. Is there some other resource? Is there some other individual I can [00:18:00] reach out to who can help me with this? Okay, before we close things out, I want you to think about the following, and this is with the intent of helping you with developing your note-taking system or strengthening it.

Ask yourself, "What part of my current system creates the most friction? Is it the reading and understanding? Is it the note-taking and jotting things down? Where am I relying on memory instead of a system?" Sometimes you get so caught up with the reading that you forget to note-take, or sometimes you start reading and then stop, and then the note-taking takes too long, and then it feels like you're not balancing the reading with the note-taking enough. You can also ask yourself, "What's a change that I could make this week?" It doesn't have to be big, just a small step that you can make this week to improve your note-taking system. And then always, always, always think about, "How can I design a system that works with my current circumstances, with my [00:19:00] current capacity, instead of the idealized version of that?"

Because it's so common. A lot of folks I work with, they're thinking, "Well, when I have the most energy, or when I'm asymptomatic, or when I have more time, I'm able to do this, this, and this." And so they're planning according to this ideal circumstance, but more often than not, their circumstances are not ideal.

So I always think plan for the worst-case scenario so that no matter what, even in the worst-case scenario, you can still move the needle forward. I will say this, and I'm gonna sound like a broken record. You don't need to have a fancy note-taking system. It doesn't have to impress anyone. You may not even have to show your notes to anyone.

You want your note-taking system to just make your future work easier. You wanna be kind to your future self. This is a conversation between present you and future you. And so [00:20:00] I hope this episode gives you permission to build a note-taking system that really honors you, your brain, how you process and retain information.

And if you found this episode helpful, please send it to a friend, send it to another grad student, send it to a lab mate, send it to a writing group buddy, or even send it to a colleague who might benefit from it. That's it for today. Thanks again for listening. And as always, I will talk to you all next time.

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