The Everything Notebook
Here is a universal truth about research projects: when you come to write up your thesis — whether you've been working on it for one year or four — you will not remember the details of how and why things came together.
Why you made that design decision. Where that measure came from. How you decided on that analysis. What your supervisor said about X in that meeting back in February.
But these are the details that are key to writing a really well-justified thesis. And because of that, they can occupy an awful lot of headspace along the way. You need a way of keeping track of it all. That's where the Everything Notebook comes in.
WHAT IS AN EVERYTHING NOTEBOOK?
I imagine you probably already have a notebook that contains scattered notes and to-do lists. But I bet you're not using it like an Everything Notebook.
An Everything Notebook is a place to document your project in a way that creates headspace for your current self AND is a gift to your future self. At minimum, it's a detailed record of your research work.
Each day, you fill in your Daily Log:
- What did you do?
- How did it go? (What was easy, where did you get stuck?)
- What's next?
That last one is the most important. As a research student, you have a busy life outside of uni. You have jobs, kids, hobbies, and other responsibilities, which means that you might not touch your project every day. By writing down what's next, you're parking yourself on the downhill — making it easy to pick up where you left off without having to spend 20 minutes reconstructing where you were up to.
IT'S MORE THAN JUST A LOG
At its best, an Everything Notebook is a metacognitive learning tool. Psychological scientists know that metacognition — the process of thinking about your own thinking and reflecting on your learning — is a key predictor of effective learning. The more you get inside your own head as you learn, the more quickly you'll come to understand the material and the process.
So use your Everything Notebook not just to track what you did and how it went, but to actually think about your thinking. Each day, alongside your daily log, pick a couple of metacognitive reflection prompts and write into them. Maybe “what was surprising today?” or “what slowed you down?” or “what feels confusing?” (link to download a prompt sheet below).
Beyond the daily log, your Everything Notebook can also be home for your:
Meeting notes.
What did your supervisor say? What did you agree to do? What questions do you still have?
2. Reading reactions.
Not just what you read, but what you thought about it. Where does that paper fit? What is that study missing?
3. General discussion ideas.
This one I feel strongly about. Even if you're just starting your research, start a section in the back of your Everything Notebook dedicated to your general discussion. Ideas will come to you as you read other research, as you watch your participants do your experiment, as you visualise your data and in discussions with your supervisor. Keep track of them. When you eventually come to write the GD, it kind of writes itself.
PAPER OR DIGITAL?
I have always kept analog Everything Notebooks, but that's probably because I'm old.
There are real advantages to a physical notebook: it's portable, you don't need wifi, and there is some evidence that handwriting is linked to deeper cognitive processing. You also don't have to deal with notifications or the temptation to switch tabs.
The downside is obvious: what if it gets lost? For digital notebooks (Google Docs, Notion, Obsidian, Notes app), you get cloud backup, searchability, and the ability to include images and links.
Honestly? Personal choice. The medium matters much less than the habit.
THE ONE RULE
There is only one rule with the Everything Notebook: write in it every day.
Not every day you make significant progress. Every day you do any research work at all — or even think about your research. Even if you did nothing on your project today, in all likelihood you had a thought about something research-related on the bus. Write it down.
The habit is the thing.
GETTING STARTED
Start today. Open a new document or grab a notebook and write down what you did, how it went, and what's next. Three sentences is enough.
If you want prompts to go deeper, grab the Everything Notebook prompt sheet (part of our FREE overwhelm toolkit) — it'll give you ideas for the reflection piece beyond the basic daily log.
Research is long. Your memory is short. The Everything Notebook is how you bridge that gap.
This post is part of the What They Forgot to Teach You series, based on Reveal Research workshops for Honours, GradDipAdv, and PhD students.
