I've been reading "How to Take Smart Notes" by Sönke Ahrens in which he talks about maximising the efficiency of the writing process by separating out research, synthesising ideas, and writing publishable content into completely separate stages.

It's given me some great insight into where I've been wasting an enormous amount of time and effort.

#1 Don't store ideas in journals.

Journals are where my ideas went to die. I would regularly spend an hour writing up notes on something I was learning, look at them admiringly, then close the notebook and forget about them forever.

Fix: Journals store ideas in the order you think of them. But this doesn't help to retrieve them when you most need them. Instead you can use an app such as Roam Research, Obsidian, or Notion to store and refine ideas. Add links between related notes, and keywords to make searching easier.

#2 Don't store ideas in projects folders.

Another way I was losing track of my work, and thus totally wasting all that hard work, was keeping notes and ideas in project-specific files. Once the project was finished, or abandoned, then all of the precious research would be lost when the project was archived.

Fix: Store the notes for individual ideas independently of your projects. Ahrens calls these "Permanent Notes". These notes will then exist indefinitely, so you can then continue to refine them and use them in future projects.

#3 Do process "fleeting notes" as soon as you can.

Probably the biggest issue for me was that I would jot down an idea in a notebook, or highlight a sentence and then... do nothing with it. Or at best, I might come back a day later having completely lost all the context that I implicitly understood while reading the book, but that now would mean nothing to me. What a pointless waste of time!

Fix: Ahrens recommends processing these "fleeting notes" into Permanent Notes as soon as possible, while the ideas are still fresh in your mind.

"Permanent notes,... are written in a way that can still be understood even when you have forgotten the context they are taken from."