Lesson overview
Objective: Provide structure for projects through notes
Summary: Academic projects span extended periods and involve multiple moving parts – meetings, tasks, deadlines, resources, and stakeholders. Project notes provide dedicated spaces to track this complexity, separate from the daily notes that manage your immediate work and the permanent notes that capture lasting insights. This lesson explores how to create project note systems that support both solo and collaborative work while remaining flexible enough to adapt to the varied nature of academic projects.
Key habits:
- Create dedicated spaces for projects that separate them from daily operational notes
- Capture project-related information in project notes rather than scattering it across multiple systems
- Review project notes weekly to track progress and identify next actions
- Archive project notes when projects complete rather than deleting or keeping them active indefinitely
Introduction
Every intellectual endeavour starts with a note. - Sönke Ahrens (2017)
Academic projects can be sprawling, far-reaching, and long-lasting in ways that make them fundamentally different from daily tasks. Writing a journal article might span six months. Developing a new programme could take two years. Running a research project might involve multiple phases over several years. PhD studies stretch across three to seven years.
The enormous variation across projects makes it difficult to define a standard structure that works for everything. A single-author literature review requires different organisational tools than a multi-institutional research collaboration. Preparing a conference workshop has different needs than chairing a departmental committee.
When project information lives alongside your daily notes, the operational details of today overwhelm the strategic thinking about longer-term work. When project notes are scattered across email threads, shared drives, meeting minutes, and various apps, no one has a clear picture of progress or priorities.
Project notes solve these problems by providing dedicated, organised spaces for each significant piece of extended work.
Understanding project notes
Project notes are fundamentally about creating bounded spaces for complex, extended work. Unlike daily notes that track what you’re doing today, or permanent notes that preserve insights for a lifetime, project notes have a clear lifecycle: they begin when a project starts, they grow as the project progresses, and they’re archived when the project completes.
Key insight: Project notes aren’t meant to be permanent parts of your active system. They’re working documents that serve a specific project for a specific period. Once that project ends, the notes get archived – not deleted like temporary notes, but moved out of your active workspace.
The boundary around a project shapes what belongs in project notes. If information is specific to this project – particular stakeholders, specific deadlines, resources related to these goals – it belongs in the project notes. If information transcends this project and will remain relevant regardless of where you work, it probably belongs in permanent notes instead.
This bounded nature also affects structure. Because they’re temporary working spaces rather than permanent knowledge stores, they can be messier and more pragmatic than your permanent notes. Project notes can include meeting transcripts, rough drafts, budget spreadsheets, email exchanges, and other working documents.
What belongs in project notes
| Element | Purpose | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Project overview | Clarity about purpose and goals | Research questions, aims, deliverables, success criteria |
| Tasks and milestones | Tracking what needs to happen | Key tasks, deadlines, responsible parties, blockers |
| Meeting notes | Context for decisions | Planning sessions, progress updates, stakeholder consultations |
| Resources | Centralised access to materials | Articles, templates, tools, contact information |
| Progress tracking | Reflections on process | What’s working, challenges encountered, lessons learned |
Project overview and purpose
Every project note system should begin with clarity about what the project is and why it matters. Six months into execution details, it’s easy to lose sight of original purpose. A clear overview helps you stay aligned with project goals even as circumstances change.
Tasks, milestones, and deadlines
Projects consist of many tasks that need coordination. Some happen in parallel; others depend on earlier tasks. Project notes track key tasks that need to happen, who’s responsible, when they’re due, and what’s blocking progress. This information gets reviewed during weekly reviews, ensuring projects keep moving forward.
Resources and references
Projects accumulate resources: relevant articles, methodological guides, templates, examples, links to tools, contact information. These need a home within project notes where they’re easily accessible but don’t clutter other systems.
Some resources might overlap with literature notes or permanent notes. In such cases, the article and your literature notes live in your reference manager, while your project notes contain a link along with specific observations about how it informs this particular project.
Project notes across different contexts
Research projects
You’re beginning research on how academics use digital tools for literature review. Your project notes include:
- Research questions and methodological approach
- Ethics application and approval documentation
- Participant recruitment schedules
- Analysis notes as you work through data
- Meeting notes with collaborators
- Funding and budget tracking
- Methodological decisions and rationales
During weekly reviews, these project notes identify what needs attention: following up with participants, scheduling collaborator meetings, or upcoming conference abstract deadlines.
Writing projects
You’re working on a journal article about threshold concepts. Your project notes include:
- Article argument outline
- Notes on which literature to engage with
- Timeline for drafts and submission
- Tracking of different versions and structural decisions
- Reviewer feedback and revision plans
- Co-author meeting notes and division of labour
These notes connect outward to permanent notes and literature notes but keep project-specific thinking in one place.
Teaching development
You’re redesigning an undergraduate module for more active learning. Your project notes include:
- Current and revised learning outcomes
- New activities and assessments being developed
- Resources needed
- Technology requirements
- Design decisions and pedagogical rationales
- Meeting notes about curriculum approval
These notes will be valuable when reviewing the module after teaching it or preparing presentations about your teaching innovations.
Creating your project notes system
Starting simple
For many academics, starting with a simple folder structure provides sufficient organisation:
- Create a main “Projects” folder
- Create subfolders for each active project
- Within each project folder, keep:
- Main overview document (“Project overview” or “README”)
- Subfolders for resources, meeting notes, drafts
This approach is conceptually familiar, requires no new software, and is easy to archive. The limitation is lack of features like task tracking or collaboration tools, but for solo academic projects, these may not be necessary.
Using notes apps
If you’re already using Obsidian, Joplin, or Roam Research for daily and permanent notes, you can incorporate project notes into the same system. Create a dedicated section for projects, with each project having its own note or linked notes.
The advantage is easy linking between project notes and other parts of your system. The challenge is maintaining clear boundaries – keeping project-specific information in project notes rather than scattering it across daily notes or mixing with permanent notes.
Project management tools
For complex projects, especially collaborative ones, tools like Asana, Trello, Todoist, or Monday may be appropriate. These provide task assignments, progress tracking, file sharing, and communication threads.
The advantage is structure and features; the disadvantage is additional complexity and learning curves. Use these when benefits clearly outweigh costs – typically for larger collaborative projects.
Integration with weekly reviews
Regardless of tools, project notes only remain effective if regularly reviewed and updated. During your weekly review, check each active project, identify progress made, determine next week’s actions, and update notes accordingly.
This weekly rhythm prevents projects from stalling due to inattention. Even if you didn’t work on a particular project this week, reviewing its notes reminds you of commitments and allows you to plan when you’ll engage with it next.
Pause and reflect
Reflection: managing project notes systems
One challenge with project notes is scope creep – both at the individual project level and in terms of what counts as a project worthy of dedicated notes. It’s tempting to create elaborate project note systems for every possible piece of work, but this quickly becomes unsustainable.
Useful heuristic: Ask whether the work will extend beyond a few weeks and involve multiple distinct activities or stakeholders. Writing a conference abstract probably doesn’t need full project notes. But writing the paper that results from that presentation probably does warrant project notes because it involves literature review, drafting, feedback, revision, and submission over several months.
Another common pitfall is failing to update project notes consistently. It’s easy to create comprehensive notes at project start, then neglect them as you get immersed in the work. This is where weekly reviews become crucial. Project notes only provide value if they reflect current reality, not just initial planning.
Remember that project notes are meant to be archived when projects complete. Don’t let completed project notes accumulate in your active workspace. When a project ends, review the project notes, extract any lasting insights into permanent notes, then move the entire project into an archive.
Activity
Week 1: Identify and organise
List all current projects – anything extending beyond simple task completion. For each project, ask: “Will this still be active next month?” Choose three active projects and create dedicated spaces with basic overview documents including:
- Project purpose and goals
- Key deliverables and deadlines
- Main stakeholders
- Current status
Week 2: Populate and refine
Move existing project information into project notes. Look through email for important exchanges, gather documents, consolidate meeting notes. Refine your project note structures based on this real information. Different projects may need different structures – let the nature of each project guide its organisation.
Week 3: Integrate with daily workflow
Use project notes in your daily work. Take meeting notes directly in project notes. Update project status when completing tasks. Capture important information from emails in project notes. Add project reviews to your weekly review routine, spending a few minutes on each active project.
Week 4: Review and systematise
Reflect on what worked over three weeks. Which aspects were most valuable? What felt like unnecessary overhead? What information did you need that wasn’t captured? Adjust your system based on actual experience. If any projects completed during this month, practice archiving them.
Key takeaways
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Create bounded spaces for complex, extended work: Unlike daily notes that track immediate tasks or permanent notes that preserve lasting insights, project notes occupy a middle ground with clear lifecycles. They begin when projects start, evolve as work progresses, and are archived when projects complete. This bounded nature means project notes can be more pragmatic and messy than permanent notes while being more organised and strategic than daily notes.
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Maintain project notes through regular review and updating: Creating comprehensive project notes at the start isn’t sufficient – they only remain valuable through consistent maintenance. Integrate project reviews into your weekly review practice, updating status, identifying next actions, and ensuring notes reflect current reality. Without this regular attention, projects stall and project notes become historical documents rather than active working tools.
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Be selective about what warrants formal project notes: Be selective about what warrants dedicated project notes versus what can be managed through daily notes and simple task lists. The test is whether work extends beyond a few weeks and involves multiple distinct activities or stakeholders. Creating project notes for everything adds unnecessary overhead; creating them for genuinely complex work provides essential structure and clarity.
Resources
- Ahrens, S. (2017). How to take smart notes: One simple technique to boost writing, learning and thinking. Sönke Ahrens.
- Forte, T. (2022). Building a second brain: A proven method to organise your digital life and unlock your creative potential. Atria Books.