Bibliography System

Until recently I was unable to hack a working system to stay on top of my reading.

In this post I share my new journaling-system for keeping track of reading, books, journal articles and other resources.

How it used to be:

Years ago during a conversation with my PhD supervisor, she suggested I start reading Bourdieu.

“Okay.” I said.

Once home, I followed a niggling feeling and started digging through my piles of notepads, only to find 10 pages of handwritten notes on Bourdieu!!!

Not only had I forgotten these notes, I had entirely forgotten I read Bourdieu.

However the actual learning from reading Bourdieu had become system immanent to my thinking. Enough for my supervisor to recognize it in our conversation.*

A new strategy for organising my reading notes

Last week I became sucked into the world of BookTube. You know … down the rabbit hole… … …

It all began with looking for journal ideas.

When I came across this video by Jess aka JashiiCorrin and the very first layout caused a Eureka moment! (play back starts exactly at this time)

Note making that might just work!

I remember better if I can recall a visual pattern.*

So the idea is to make a two-page spread overview of a set of resources: books, journal articles, blog posts, with their chronological reference number. This will regularly remind me of the resources I have already read.

After every 24 resources I make a new spread this has four reasons:

1. keeps the dopamine going for wanting to do a new thing
2. motivates me to fill the boxes thus stick with the system
3. clusters a manageable amount of reading into a simple overview
4. keeps a chronological record of my reading that is easy to navigate visually

Followed by a double page for each source with key citation information:

• Name(s)
• Title
• Year
• ISBN, DOI, or URL
• Key points
• Favourite Quotes

It might also help to reduce the amount of quadruple bookmarked resources in Zotero!

*Side-Quest:

Yes, the whole “out of sight out of mind” thing is a serious problem for many ADHD brained humans.

And please stop calling it Object Permanence issues! That is something entirely different.

Some ADHD folk are now talking about this effect as a lack of Object Constancy, which originally refers to relationship issues. The Goblin Tools blog has a pretty decent summary if you are interested in a side quest. I am not sure either of these terms is accurate.

https://www.goblinxadhd.com/blog/understanding-object-constancy-in-adhd-strategies/