Introduction

The path of anyone in academia is fundamentally characterized by handling information, no matter if you are a student, an educator or a researcher. The flow of information can involve anything from methods, new subjects, lectures, meetings, conferences, articles, spontaneous ideas and concepts for your next article or research project. With all of that information around, it is no secret that most of us are chronically overloaded and overwhelmed. If you were looking for a silver bullet solution to solve this information overload, we have to disappoint you. But there is hope! And the hope is note-taking. It may be painfully obvious, but taking notes and optimizing the way you do so is the first place to look if you want to become and stay not only productive but also sane in the academic world.

A question of using the right tool

One reason why we are chronically overloaded with information is that we are not using the right tools for the right task. While navigating our academic daily lives, we are constantly generating and absorbing new information. While in the moment it usually all feels logical and clear, we all know how hard it will be to remember all the relevant details after a couple of days have passed. This is because we intuitively rely on our memory to keep track of everything: Assignments, lecture contents, research ideas, deadlines and even those all-important aha!-moments we had.

Tip

Your brain is for having ideas. Not holding them.

– David Allen

And forgetting some crucial details is just the tip of the iceberg. Trying to keep everything up there with no backup often adds to the stress we already experience more than enough of. Trying to keep all the different streams and tidbits of information neatly organized in your mind surely is a challenge. Especially because we know from experience that we can’t always rely on our own mental capacity.

So it seems like preaching to the choir that note-taking is the way to solve this. But is it really?

The fallacy here is probably that taking notes just seems like such a straightforward idea. “If I keep it in my head, I might forget it, so I just need write it down somewhere, right?” This simplistic view might have worked 100 years ago, where information was still scarce enough to be manageable. And if it wasn’t it was at least still possible to remember where you wrote down what (if probably would fit in a single notebook or two). But in today’s information economy, there is so much more information, that even remembering your notes’ “metadata” (where did I write that down that again?) is a veritable challenge in and of itself.

Like many of you, we have also resorted to some sort of scattered note-taking, using a mix of handwritten notes, basic text files, and various apps without a coherent system. This often leads to some or all of the following problems:

1. Forgetting where the information is
2. Forgetting the information was written down in the first place
3. Not having it around at the moment where you need to write down or retrieve information
4. Your notes, or part of them, can get lost
5. Lacking user-friendliness, so in your weak (and lazy) moments, you don’t take any or not enough notes

Working backwards form the problems with non-centralized note-taking we outlined earlier, we want a system that meets the following criteria:

1. It must be searchable
2. It must allow a clear structure and hierarchy of projects, ideas, etc. so it’s clear where to put (and where to search for) what.
3. It must be accessible on all of your devices (laptop, desktop, mobile phone)
4. It must be safely backed-up
5. It must be accessible and user-friendly to add and edit notes

While not all of these might be equally important to everyone, they are general enough to consider for most users. We could add criteria such as “it must fit my philosophy for user-experience” or it “must have feature xyz”, but these are more user-specific, so we will neglect them for now.

Tip

Use a centralized, digital Personal Knowledge Management System (PKMS). Don’t reinvent the wheel regarding basics, use a system that is already useable in its simplest form out of the box.

Enter: Personalized Knowledge Management apps

Luckily there are plenty of ready-made applications that come with all of our 5 required features (and sometimes many, many more). Some of the most commonly used apps are:

• Microsoft OneNote (as part of Office 365) *
• Obsidian *
• Microsoft Loop (as part of Office 365)
• Notion
• Evernote
• (And many more)

* probably the most used ones at Tilburg University

All of these will do the trick if you are just looking for the basics (see above). Each of them come with their own philosophy regarding structure, layout, workflow and flexibility. So you most likely will have to try several ones before you find the one that will work for you the best. This will probably require quite a bit of trial-and-error, but we promise you: It’s worth it.

To get you started, we will compare OneNote and Obsidian which are probably the most used PKMS apps in academia. Even if you are not deciding for either of them, this will give you somewhat of a practical guideline on what to look for, on what you can expect from different systems and onwhat you might want to avoid. So here it is:

OneNote

OneNote has been around for over 20 years and while it was originally only available as part of Microsoft 365 suite, it is now free to use for everyone across platforms. Behind the scenes, OneNote stores a collection of “Notebooks” in a proprietary format (.one). Notebooks have sections and pages with up to 2 sub-pages. This comes in handy if you want to structure your notes by (sub-)project, subject, theme, person etc. Another handy feature is inserting links from one page to another (or to the web). For retrieving information you can either do a global text search or you can search on the current page.

You can set up OneNote to back up (Synchronize) your notebooks via your Microsoft account, which is essential to fulfil criteria 3 and 4 (Cross-device access and backup). What you should keep in mind though is that uploading information to the cloud and sharing it with another (commercial) party is always a potential privacy concern. This fact is amplified by the fact that you will potentially have a lot of sensitive information in your notes, which can be of tremendous value for state actors, advertisers and potentially even criminals. So we highly recommend to not take this aspect of your PKMS lighly. This should not only involve checking the Privacy Statements but also choose a party that you trust (or mistrust the least.)

Tip

Backing up your PKMS is a potential privacy nightmare. Choose your provider carefully.

Benefits

• Free to use and free to back-up
• Flat learning curve because note taking workflow resembles MS Word
• Decent compatibility with other MS Office products
• Notebooks can be shared and collaborated with with colleagues
• Handwriting and drawing features

Drawbacks

• Unclear privacy and GDPR situation if not used within the SURF framework
• Unflexible note organization
• The link text to another page don’t update if the target page name changes
• Rumored to be phased out in favor of “Loop” in the near future
• Lacks a lot of features that Word has.
• If you don’t like the workflow to format notes in Word, you will not have a good time here either
• Few plugins to expand functionality
• Rigid layout of user interface

Obsidian

Obsidian is only a short 4 years old but has already transformed the world of note-taking, especially in academia. The base version is free to use for personal and non-profit use, including educational use. Behind the scenes, you Notes (aka your Vault) are just a collection of folders and text files (and multimedia files if you add any). More specifically, the text files are Markdown (.md) files. Markdown is a universal standard to express document formatting with plain text. So for example, a heading of level n is preceded by n hashs (#). So, for example,

# Heading 1
## Heading 1.1
### Heading 1.1.1

becomes

Heading 1

Heading 1.1

Heading 1.1.1

With Markdown you can express basically any formatting you would want in your notes, including lists, tables and callouts. Markdown is a widely used standard, so while it will require a bit of a learning curve, it is a useful skill to have in general. By the way, this article is written in Markdown, too.

You can back up your vault with any third party cloud storage that allows file system integration. These include OneDrive or SURFdrive, both of which should be trustworthy enough for your notes (as long as you are using OneDrive via the SURF agreements with Microsoft. If you don’t have access. If you don’t have access to either, you can consider getting an Obsidian Sync license for 4 USD/month. Obsidian claims that your data is end-to-end encrypted and while you can’t really confirm this yourself, it is a strong promise.

Since notes in Obsidian are plain text, you can do a lot of automated processing on them. This could include reformatting your notes with a script, so everything is nice and uniform.

The main reason why Obsidian is so popular is probably because it’s incredibly customizable. This goes from ultra-lightweight and simplistic to as complex as you want it. While Obsidian offers some built-in handy tools like Canvases and Graphs of connected Notes, the true power lies in the plugins built by the community. You can find the most popular ones here.

Benefits

• Free for personal and educational use
• Lots of plugin to expand capabilities, e.g.
  • Tasks for flexible and advanced to-do planning
  • Zotero
• Plain text files (non-proprietary) with all its perks regarding automation
• Flexible layout of user interface
• Decent formatting compatibility with Office 365 and Google Office
• Close to open source
• No affiliation with large tech company
• Nice and helpful community
• End-to-end encryption with proprietary Sync

Drawbacks

• Learning curve if you don’t know Markdown yet
• Can’t share and collaborate on notes seamlessly
• Built-in backup requires a subscription
• Image embedding and resizing is a bit of a pain

As you can tell our personal picks of the Benefits and Drawbacks is more favorable for Obsidian, and we make no secret out of it that we think it’s the superior option for most academics. However OneNote and surely many other apps out there would be a fine choice for you and your specific use cases and preferences.

Tip

We don’t care which PKMS app you use. We like Obsidian though.

This brings us to another fascinating topic regarding PKMS apps: customization.

Customizing your PKMS

Since you will inadvertently spend a lot of time working with your highly personal notes, it makes a lot of sense design the interface around them so it fits your needs and your preferences. If customization is important to you, Obsidian is surely the superior choice, as is comes with an library of excellent Plugins, tutorials, and a thriving community who is eager to help. To get you started, check out our Obsidian Feature Article.

Let’s wrap things up with a word of caution, though. It is very easy to get lost in customization and spend a lot of time in picking plugin and tweaking their settings and integration with your notes. More often than not, we found that this leads nowhere or the integrations are quickly abandoned again. So our recommendation is to start simple with as little plugins and fancy features as possible. Take the time to understand your notes, your brain and your own behavior interacting with your notes. And if you come to the conclusion that you need more features, introduce them gradually and only move to the next one, once you firmly established (or abandoned) all features you already introduced.

Tip

Start as simple as possible, add complexity when needed.

Further learning

PKMS app are a hot topic right now and there are a lot of comparisons, tutorials, opinion pieces or simply videos of people showing off their notes interface to the world. Any of those are a good place to start. If you are interested to know more about something specific, the best way is to Google away.

For OneNote, Microsoft offers some tutorials on their own pages, as well as their community forum. For Obsidian there is also plenty of official documentation and we found that Reddit in particular is a great source of tips and troubleshooting for specific matters.