Today I'm going to share with you how I go about organising all my notes and other work for university and explain my process for filing information. I worked out this system at the beginning of my first year and it's really worked well for me over the course of my degree, enabling me to find things easily and keep all the important information in one place and readily accessible. Of course there are many different ways you can organise your work and this might not be for you, but I hope it will give you some ideas of how you might approach it, especially if you're just starting at uni.

First things first, the main program I use is Microsoft OneNote. It's basically a note-taking program which allows you to type or handwrite notes and insert all kinds of media including photos, videos, drawing, screen clippings, spreadsheets, voice notes and so on. There's a huge amount you can do with OneNote as you can share files and work on a document together, and obviously it works on both desktop and mobile devices. I only use the version for Windows 10 which came with my Microsoft Office suite, and I mostly use it for text-based information so in that sense I probably don't use it at its full capacity. However, it's still really useful and flexible and works perfectly for me. Also, I have all my notebooks synced to OneDrive so I can be sure I'll never lose my work.

In this post I'm going to be giving you an overview of how I keep my notebooks organised and then showing you in more detail how I set everything out within a single module. If you're not familiar with OneNote or if yours looks different to mine, the hierarchy I use is as follows: at the highest level we have notebooks (on the left), which are divided into sections (the tabs along the top) which are divided into pages and subpages (along the right hand side).

As you can see, down the left hand side of the screen I have all my notebooks. I have a notebook for each module, and you can see the modules I took in third year here. If I scroll down I have the rest of the modules I've taken at uni in previous years which I like to have to hand in case I ever need to refer back to something or check a past reading list. You'll notice I like to colour-code my modules, and I use the same colours for things like colouring in my timetable. I also have a personal notebook, a general uni notebook (which we're in right now) and a notebook for reading notes. I'll just go through these quickly first.

My uni notebook doesn't have a lot of information in it (you can pretty much see the organisation in the above screenshot) but I use it for organising general stuff about my degree that doesn't fall into specific modules. For example, I have tables of all my deadlines, feedback, my to-do list and other admin-type things. I also have a French module I took in second year as a section within this notebook because I only used OneNote to organise my exam revision and I didn't think it needed a whole notebook.

My reading notebook is where I keep all my notes from every single thing I have ever read for uni. In this notebook the sections correspond to modules, which are colour-coded to match the notebooks for each of those modules. This (below) is a quick look at the section for my Feminist Geographies module from second term of third year. As you can see by looking at the right hand column, I have my readings organised by what I read them for, so for example lectures, workshops, tutorials, formative assignment, summative assignment and exams. This paper I've selected here was a lecture reading (in fact my only lecture reading for that module, whoops!). Each page (or subpage) has all my notes for that reading and is organised in the same way: title of the paper/book chapter across the top in the title space, the reference for that reading in a column down the side (so that I know exactly what I read and I can easily copy it into an essay bibliography if needed) and the main body of notes in the main section. As this was a lecture reading I was reading for detail and background rather than relevance to an essay so my notes are very detailed. In general I like to write in full sentences or phrases rather than just key words as it means I'll find it easier to understand what it was about if I refer back to my notes in the future.

Here's another look at my reading notes for a different module called Neoliberal Life. This module was mostly workshop based so I have the pages organised into readings I did for each workshop (it was a LOT let me tell you), with a couple of more general ones at the top.

Now lets look at how I structure one of my module notebooks. This module was called Power, Politics and Space and it was a year-long 20 credit module. It was divided into three blocks of lectures (Citizenship, Migration and Labour; Geographies of Violence; and Colonialism, Political Violence and Uneven Development), which is why I've got three sections at the top. Within every module notebook I always have a 'General' section where I keep important information for that module, so in this case you can see I have my notes from the revision lecture and revision workshop (which didn't fall under any of the blocks) and then my own notes from planning my formative and summative essays as well as the exam.

This is what the first lecture from the section for the block called 'Citizenship, Migration and Labour' looks like. (I've blanked out the names and contact details of my lecturers just FYI). As you can see, down the right hand side I've got all the lectures for this block in chronological order, and each with a subpage of readings for that lecture. The readings are usually given to us as a list in a Word document on our online learning system at the beginning of the year, so I make sure I copy and paste that information into the relevant subpage for that module as soon as it becomes available. The layout for these lecture pages is quite similar to my reading notes pages: I put the number and title of the lecture in the title space, then the date of the lecture on the left, and the main body is the actual lecture material.

I have a system for organising the actual lecture material too. When the PowerPoint slides are uploaded to our online learning system before the lecture I download them, go through them and copy the information as plain text into a page within OneNote. It's not actually as laborious as it sounds as you can usually do it all in one go by choosing 'outline view' and then highlighting all the text, but I like to go through it all just in case to make sure my stripped-down version is an accurate representation of what's on the lecture slides. This is useful for three reasons: firstly, it means I familiarise myself with the content before the lecture so I have an idea of what it's going to be about; secondly, I have all the lecture material easily accessible with a click of my mouse rather than having to find and open a whole PowerPoint document every time I want to check something in a lecture; thirdly, it means I can take notes directly into the lecture material rather than writing it in the notes box under the slides in PowerPoint, which is what I've seen a lot of people do. This means I'm able to add in notes exactly where they're meant to be and even expand on points as the lecturer goes through them. I always add in my own notes that I take during lectures in a different colour, so I can be sure which bits of information were originally in the lecture material and which I've added in. You can see an example of this below:

And that's basically it! Some modules have a slightly different organisation depending on how they're structured, for instance for term-long modules which aren't divided into lecture blocks the sections at the top are just 'lectures', 'tutorial', 'seminars' or whatever is relevant to that module. Sometimes we don't get given reading lists for each individual lecture but for the module as a whole, so in that case I'll put the whole list in a page under the 'General' section of that module. But that's essentially my system, which I adapt slightly as needed.

I hope this was helpful in some way. As a quick disclaimer, if it wasn't already clear from this post I am an organisation fiend and I absolutely love sorting things out, colour-coding information and creating elaborate systems - so if that isn't your thing, don't worry! This is just the way I've chosen to do it and all I can say is it's worked for me, so I hope it might be helpful for someone else too.

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