Emergent scholarship

Course Lessons

Daily notes

10 min read

Lesson overview

Objective: Establish a habit of writing daily notes

Summary: Daily notes serve as an extension of your working memory, helping you track progress throughout your day without keeping everything in your head. Rather than juggling multiple mental threads or relying on scattered reminders, daily notes provide a single, reliable space to capture tasks, meeting notes, and fleeting thoughts. This lesson explores how to build a sustainable daily notes practice that reduces cognitive load and creates the foundation for effective weekly planning.

Key habits:

  • Start each working day with a daily note using a consistent template
  • Capture all tasks, meetings, and thoughts in your daily note rather than across multiple systems
  • Review your daily note at the end of each day to identify incomplete items and plan for tomorrow
  • Use your daily notes during weekly reviews to reflect on progress and plan ahead

Introduction

My notes now stop me from having to go backwards whenever I pick up something again… Ideas stay intact and usable, concepts don’t need to be reworded each time, experiments can be incremental, projects can stand still for a while but can restart immediately when I return to them. That’s valuable return on the time spent making those notes. - Ton Zijlstra (2022)

Trying to keep track of everything in your head is exhausting. Most academics have developed some system for managing their day – a paper diary, a to-do list app, a calendar, sticky notes around the monitor, or some combination of all of these. The problem is that diaries don’t work well for managing a changing list of tasks, to-do lists don’t capture the narrative of your day, and calendars show meetings but not the thinking work between them.

This fragmentation of your organisational system reflects a fragmentation of your thinking. When your tasks live in one app, your meeting notes in another, your random thoughts on scraps of paper, and your time blocks in a calendar, you’re constantly switching between systems to understand what you should be doing. Each switch costs mental energy and creates opportunities for things to slip through the cracks.

Daily notes solve this problem by providing a single, consistent space to manage your working day. They’re not trying to be a comprehensive project management system or a permanent knowledge base. Instead, they’re a scratch pad where you can externalise everything that’s competing for your attention, allowing you to focus on whatever matters most in the moment.

Daily notes as working memory

Working memory is where you temporarily store information you need in the short term. The problem is that working memory has severe limitations – research suggests we can only hold about four distinct items at once, and even that requires effort.

Your daily notes are an external version of this working memory. By capturing tasks, thoughts, and information in a reliable external system, you free up mental capacity for the actual thinking work of academia. When you know that everything is written down, you can let go of the anxiety about forgetting something important.

Think of your daily note as a conversation with your future self. When you write “Email Bob about conference deadline” in your morning planning, you’re creating a clear instruction for your afternoon self. When you capture a fleeting thought about a potential research direction, you’re ensuring that idea will be there when you have time to develop it further.

What belongs in daily notes

The key question when deciding whether something belongs in your daily note is: “Is this associated with today specifically?” Daily notes capture information tied to a particular day rather than timeless knowledge or long-term project planning.

Tasks and time blocks

Your daily note should include:

  • Tasks you plan to complete today, organised by time blocks
  • Realistic plans for how you’ll spend your finite hours
  • Visual representation of available time to help you make better decisions about what to take on

This approach forces you to be honest about what’s actually possible in a day. When you see your available time blocks filled with commitments, it becomes clear that adding “just one more thing” isn’t feasible.

Meeting notes and interactions

  • Capture meeting notes directly in your daily note with temporal context
  • Use a standard format: “Meeting - [Group] - [Topic] (Date)”
  • Include informal corridor conversations and quick decisions
  • Automatically preserve context when you review notes later

Fleeting thoughts and observations

One of the most valuable functions of daily notes is capturing thoughts that arise during your day:

  • Connections you notice while reading
  • Solutions that occur to you between meetings
  • Reflections after teaching sessions
  • Ideas that pop up during routine work

Without a designated place to capture these thoughts, you’re faced with an uncomfortable choice: interrupt your current work to act on the thought, or risk forgetting it entirely. Daily notes provide a third option – capture it quickly and return to your current focus.

Daily notes in practice

Starting your day: Before opening email, review yesterday’s daily note and create today’s note from your template. Review incomplete tasks, check your calendar, and identify your most important task. Allocate specific time blocks to that work. This takes perhaps five minutes but sets the direction for your entire day.

During focused work: Keep your daily note open alongside your work. When interruptions arise – remembering you need to email someone, a colleague messaging about coffee next week – capture them in your daily note without breaking your writing flow. The act of writing them down provides psychological closure so you can return to deep work immediately.

End of day review: Spend five minutes reviewing your daily note before leaving. Check incomplete tasks, note what’s moving to tomorrow or next week, and glance at tomorrow’s calendar. This brief review creates closure for your working day without carrying an anxious mental list of everything undone.

Creating your daily note system

Choosing your format

Pen and paper advantages:

  • No distractions or notifications
  • More contemplative feel
  • Simple A5 notebook is all you need

Digital system advantages:

  • Searchability across months of notes
  • Copy and paste functionality
  • Synchronisation across devices
  • Apps like Simplenote, Joplin, or built-in notes apps work well

Key principle: Start simple, build the habit, and refine your approach over time based on what you actually need rather than what seems theoretically optimal.

Developing your template

A daily note template provides structure without being prescriptive. Most academics find value in including:

  • Time blocks (showing when you’ll work on what)
  • Task lists organised by domain (teaching, research, admin)
  • Space for meeting notes and reflections
  • Optional elements (gratitude, achievements) only if they enhance rather than complicate

The daily note template provided with this lesson offers a starting point, but treat it as a draft. After a few weeks, you’ll have a clear sense of which sections you actually use. Let your practice inform your template.

Integrating with weekly reviews

Daily notes become significantly more powerful when combined with weekly reviews. During your weekly review, you’ll go through the past week’s daily notes to reflect on accomplishments, identify patterns, and plan for the week ahead. This creates a feedback loop where your daily practice informs your weekly planning, which in turn helps you use your daily notes more effectively.

Pause and reflect

Reflection: managing daily note practice

Daily notes can be deceptively simple in concept but challenging in practice. You might find yourself forgetting to open your daily note in the morning, or slipping back into old habits. This is normal. Building any new habit requires time and consistency.

There’s also a tendency to track everything that can be tracked. Some elaborate templates encourage recording weather, step count, calorie intake, gratitude lists, yearly goals, and more. While these additions might work for some people, they risk transforming your daily note from a practical working tool into a burden.

The emphasis of daily notes should be on getting things done and creating head space for your most important work. Any element that doesn’t serve these purposes is optional at best. Start minimal and add complexity only when you’ve identified a genuine need.

Remember that daily notes are meant to reduce stress, not create it. If you miss a day, simply start fresh the next day. If your note becomes messy during a chaotic day, that’s fine – it served its purpose of capturing information in the moment.

Activity

Download the template

Key takeaways

  • Reduce cognitive load by externalising working memory: Rather than trying to hold everything in your head – your tasks, your commitments, your fleeting thoughts – daily notes provide a reliable external system. This frees up mental capacity for the actual thinking work that matters most in academic life. The simple act of writing something down provides psychological closure, allowing you to focus fully on whatever you’re working on in the moment.

  • Create a foundation for weekly planning: When you review your daily notes during your weekly review, you’re not trying to remember what you did or reconstruct conversations from fragments. Everything is captured in temporal context, making it easy to reflect on progress, identify patterns, and plan effectively for the coming week. This creates a feedback loop where your daily practice directly supports your strategic thinking.

  • Start simple and let practice inform your system: The most elaborate daily note template in the world is useless if you don’t actually use it. Begin with the basics – tasks, time blocks, and a space for notes – and only add complexity as you discover genuine needs through practice. The goal is a sustainable habit that reduces stress and increases effectiveness, not a perfect system that requires significant overhead to maintain.

Resources

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