#supposed to be writing an annotated bibliography rn

[mommy-issues-haver]

love the girlies who have lana or ts or trisha paytas as their pfp. if that’s u i love u. bc ur right. they are us and we are them.

[tangyss]

i took a sociology module bc it sounded interesting and im only realsing now, an hour before a mock assignment is due, that this was a goddamn awful idea for someone who has only two potentionally working brain cells to try and do

[somerabbitholes]

Hi!!! I'm doing my thesis rn and I'm a bit all over the place in terms of organizing everything (deadlines, to-dos, thesis notes, and journalling) so I was wondering if you could explain how you use your notebooks / journals in terms of these things since you seem to use them a lot? Or some tips? Thank you so much!!

hi! i use a combination of google calendar and notion to keep track of my deadlines and to-dos and both of them cover pretty much everything. with my notebooks, i have three: one is a journal for everything from writing stubs to copied out quotes to watchlists and recpies ─ just general brain dump stuff. it’s not a bullet journal, because i’ve realised it doesn’t work for me; it makes more sense to me to just have a journal that holds everything and follows no structure. i also don’t journal everyday, and it’s hardly systematic ─ sometimes i’ll just write a sentence and hope 40 year old me doesn’t think 22 year old me was an idiot. sometimes when i’m outside i also have semi-journal notes on google keep that i write into the notebook later.

the second notebook is for research (university related and personal projects) and notes on it. this is where i play around with my ideas and try to plan my essays and pin down the structure i want. the third notebook is perhaps the cleanest one: it holds the notes from the books (mostly non-fiction) i’m reading. 

i use google calendar to track deadlines, set daily reminders for grocery, or stuff like take your medicine. i keep my to-do ─ personal and academic ─ in my notion. i shared how i use my notion a while back but it has completely changed since then and that setup wasn’t that useful at all actually ─ so i took that post down. 

i do find notion really helpful to organize my research though ─

like this is one of the things i’m working on right now. for the home page for this paper, i have a list of things i need to write/add to my paper, a link to the citation guide i’m supposed to use, a to-do list of things that aren’t strictly about writing but are about the paper. i also have a list of things i need to read (this is a priority list, not an exhaustive one), and finally a list of sources i need to look up. you’ll also see a page for sources, which looks like this

it’s a table where i add all the sources i’ve used, and i can filter them by what they are (books, papers, archives etc). i have a column that’s for tiny brief notes on what that source has, while the more specific stuff like quotes or page numbers or anything else i add inside the page for that source. it works kind of like an annotated bibliography but more flexible. 

i arrived at this system with a lot of trial and error, and you’re going to have to do the same to figure out what works best for you. i like digital to-do’s and calendars because they let me move stuff around a lot, and they’re easy to access from my phone as well. i hope that helps ─ or helps you get started ─ and good luck for your thesis!