Hello, and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast greatest hits. It is Wednesday, it is note-taking week, and I promised you talk about stationery. This one makes me laugh because I used to be the highlighting queen. I used to think that stationery was the solution to all of my problems, and that if I had nicer pens, better notebooks, the perfect planner, that everything would be absolutely perfect. I'm always sad to disillusion people of that, but in this episode, this slightly flippant but actually very important episode, I'm gonna tell you why you should be stopping highlighting your work and what you should do instead. I hope you enjoy
Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast. Now, I'm gonna preface this episode with a bit of a disclaimer. And that disclaimer is, I love stationery as much as any of you. You leave me unattended in some fancy stationery store or art supply [00:01:00] shop or anything like that, and I'm going to make bad financial choices.
I have cupboards full of stationery and craft supplies, beautiful things that are either going to make me organized or are going to be beautiful and I'm going to use them and I love them. I love stationery. However, however, massive however, I am also your academic coach here. I am also here to make sure that you're not wasting your work time doing things that aren't helping you.
And that's why this is a pretty short episode. It's nearly Christmas when I record this. Nobody wants to be listening to me whitter about work for 45 minutes. It's going to be pretty short, but I'm here to deliver some bad news. I am hereby banning highlighters. No more highlighters. All of you who are reading and highlighting key passages and telling yourself that you're working.
I'm banning them. I'm not usually very dictatorial. People who [00:02:00] come to my membership, who come to my coaching sessions, know that I do a kind of non directive form of coaching where we figure out what you're thinking and what you're choosing you want to do. Here, no. I'm just banning them. Ban highlighters.
You can use them to decorate around the edges if you want to, but that doesn't count as work. Okay, I'll give you that much. Beyond that, banned. I'm going to give you four reasons why I'm banning highlighters and then you can let me know whether you agree or not, whether you are going to abide by my new ruling.
So. First reason is that it is way too easy to highlight way too much of the text. There's something very satisfying about going zzzz, zzzz, across and highlighting things. It's going all in a pretty colour and the pen feels nice and everything. And before you know it, you've highlighted four paragraphs without really [00:03:00] fully processing why they're important to you.
Okay, there's no barrier to how much you highlight. Whereas if you're taking actual notes, and I'm going to say at the end what I think you should be doing in those actual notes. Whereas if you're taking actual notes, it takes a bit of cognitive effort. It takes a bit of physical effort, especially if you're handwriting it, which I would recommend a lot of the time.
And it means you kind of have to be selective, because you can't just write about every single bit of it if you're actually writing it out, or at least there's a kind of time and effort penalty to choosing to do that. When you just highlight, you can highlight way too much, and doesn't force you to be selective, and that is a problem.
What we want you to be doing here is prioritizing. We want you to be thinking. We want you to be choosing which elements are most important, not just willy nilly turning all of it purple without really thinking about it. So that's the first reason, it's too easy [00:04:00] to highlight too much.
The second reason is that when you're highlighting it, you're not processing it in any way. You are merely putting a coloured strip over the top of it. What we want to do with reading is we don't want to just take it in and go, Oh, that's useful. We want to read it. We want to check our understanding.
We want to kind of know what it means, summarise it. But we also, really importantly, want to connect it with other things that we already know. Other things that we've read. Other things that we're planning to do, for example. Okay? And highlighting doesn't do any of that stuff. In fact, maybe this is just a me confession.
You can tell me whether you do this as well or not. But when I highlight, sometimes I start reading a paragraph and I think oh, this is going to be useful and I highlight the whole paragraph and I don't necessarily read the last few sentences because it's like [00:05:00] oh, this whole paragraph is useful and you're almost kind of marking it in some way.
It's not helpful. Much, much more helpful to be writing those notes and actually processing it through your brain, connecting it to the other things that you know, and kind of registering it cognitively, rather than almost just marking it for future.
The third reason is that when you see highlighting in the future, you have no idea why you highlighted it. Okay, it's orange. Maybe some of you have a fancy colour coding system which perhaps works to some extent, you know, blue for methodological and green for whatever else. But most of the time, you don't really know why you highlighted that thing.
So this notion, ooh, I'll be able to find it later. It's just completely misguided. You'll be able to find it, you'll be able to see that it was highlighted, but you won't know why. You know, it's like when you find a random phone number on a piece of paper and you're like, I have no idea who that is or whatever, okay?
Just [00:06:00] because it's highlighted, it doesn't tell you what you were thinking when you read it. It doesn't tell you why it was important, which bit of your work it was important for, whether it's still important. It doesn't tell you any of those things, just tells you it's green. Green's not helping.
That's the third reason. And then the fourth reason is that when you re read that article at some point in the future, you may and probably should be reading it for a different reason. The first time you read something, maybe it's just to get a feel for what the article's about. Maybe it's to get an understanding of the background of the area you're looking at.
But maybe the next time you read it, What you really need to do is really understand their methods, because you're going to use methods that are similar to this, and you need to really pick apart exactly what they did, and what controls they used, or what, you know, what ethical considerations there were, or whatever.
Now you've got an article that's got loads of orange highlighting all over it, That was from when you were reading it to understand what they [00:07:00] found and what the kind of background is. But now you're reading it for methods. Those orange bits aren't relevant anymore. You need to be in a different section and those orange bits, they're going to draw your attention.
That's the point of highlighters. And now, they're just a distraction. They're pulling your eye over there when you're reading it for a different function. And, most importantly, even if you're reading it for the same function, you're reading it to fully understand their argument, for example. You are now not the same.
Stuff that was important to you when you first read it is not what's important to you now because you know more, you understand more. So those bits that you highlighted because they helped you understand the basics are not going to help you understand the nuances that you're now trying to pull out of it.
Highlights become a distraction as soon as you have moved on from the point at which you initially highlighted them. Highlighters are not useful research [00:08:00] tools. So what do we do instead? You write. You write stuff. And you don't just summarize what they're saying. That should be a tiny bit of your notes.
They did this, they found that, they argued this. That should be a little tiny bit of your notes. I want you to write about what thoughts are you having. What thoughts do you have when you read this? What are you confused about? What doesn't make sense to you? What has it reminded you of? What gaps have you spotted?
Where does this connect to something? Where could this influence future work? Where do you wish you'd read this before? You're writing those sorts of things. Almost like a little diary of reading it. Those are the notes that are useful. You're processing it cognitively. You're connecting it together. And when you come back to those notes, you will be able to see what you were thinking then.
And so it will be much easier to then interpret it and then to see how different it is from what you're [00:09:00] thinking now. That's what we should be doing. It's more effort. Definitely. But it is so much more productive. You won't end the day feeling like, well, I've read a load of stuff. I've highlighted a load of stuff, but I don't feel like I've got anywhere.
Cause that's the worst feeling. There is nothing wrong with hard work. All of us came into our PhDs, academia, knowing that we were going to do hard work. The problem with hard work is when you work hard and you can't see an outcome from it. You can't see what good it's and that is what highlighting will do.
I am getting very strict. So take your highlighters, do something beautiful with them. That's fine. Create art in your spare time that uses the highlighters that you are no longer using for your research. Let's leave highlighters in 2024 and move on to much more effective ways of reading and note taking.
[00:10:00] I'm being slightly flippant in all of this. If you like highlighters, figure out a system, but that system needs to have recognition of the fact that you need to process it. It needs to have recognition of the fact that when you come back to it, you want it to make some sense and that you will be a different person coming back for a different purpose.
If you can figure out a way to do that with highlighters, Happy days, you go, you do you, but I would suggest ditching them entirely. The one form of highlighting I do allow, and for those of you who are on YouTube, you'll see me holding them up, are these little, tiny, transparent Stickers. So for those of you on the podcast, there may be five centimetres long, something like that, half a centimetre wide, slightly translucent, and mine are blue, yellow, pink and green.
These I use not when I'm reading articles, but I do use them to pick out key items in a list. If I've got a list of five things I want to do today, I might put one of these over [00:11:00] the top of the one I'm doing right now. And the joy of that, it picks something out specifically, but when it's done, I can take it off and move it somewhere else.
So, not as part of the research process as such, but for highlighting specific things, I highly recommend these little stickers. You can find them from all good stationers and the big bad capitalist delivery place that I'm sure most people actually get them from.
Thank you all for listening. I'm gonna set you a challenge now. Go and draw a picture with your highlighters. Send me a picture of how you experience academia, how you experience doing a PhD, using the medium of highlighters. Let's bring some creativity to this, our game of ours. who knows? I might even give a prize to somebody who sends me the best picture that they've drawn with highlighters. I shouldn't be encouraging you to procrastinate, but do it intentionally in a break for fun.
I'm recording this when I have just come back from a Girlguiding camp, so I've been away with a whole load of 10 to 14-year-olds. I am very [00:12:00] tired, and I am now very tempted to go draw pictures with highlighters instead of getting on with my work. But I'm not going to. I'm gonna stay focused. Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this episode, and I will be back next week, hopefully more well-rested for two more episodes of the PhD Life Coach Greatest Hits. See you there
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