Writing over Infinite Scrolling | Journal like a Scientist

so one thing that all scientists do is search for questions and answers and throughout this process they come up with hypothesis that they try to prove or disprove and I think we can actually learn a lot from this scientific process of note taking as I believe that throughout our lives we actually do a lot of experiments that we don't take dedicated notes for so for example if you're decluttering your house how does that affect your life or if you're trying to learn a new skill what kind of insight that you have during the way of

learning this new skill so if you have any question you're trying to answer or any experiment you're trying to implement into your life I think these three scientific methods of notetaking could really help you or guide you along this journaling method so I'm a thir year PhD student right now and I've learned a lot throughout my PhD process about not taking and journaling in general and the first skill I really learned is the idea of experiment logging So within science what you do is you record all your experiments successful or not and all the questions

that you pose and the answers that you seek and then you note down what you learned from each of these experiments and I think this can be really valuable because usually we only remembered in our real lives whenever we had successes but we actually don't learn so much from our failures and the part of learning from your failures in science is almost the most important cuz you can learn so much more from your failures than from your successes so in general for this experiment logging the idea what you do is for each experiment that you

make is you write down these sections so you write down the hypothesis methods results and conclusions and to translate this for example to a real life experiment is when you're trying to learn a new skill in 30 days for example Neuroscience you want to learn as much about the brain in 30 days you would write down your hypothesis to how you think this would go what you think you would learn what you think you would gain from this skill acis you would write down your methods how you think you're going to learn as much as

possible about the brain in 30 days and you would write down your results but then in the end you would also write down your conclusions so actually how you found that you did after these 30 days and how you found that you went about it uh you can do this in several ways so the way I usually do it is I have a dedicated La notebook that is always lying in my office but I also have a digital kind of second brain or a digital notebook and that for me is in notion but there are

many apps that you can use and I will list some of them here and all of them work quite similar the only thing is that you just have a few dedicated places where you can write down these thoughts about experiments that you conducted so the second part of experiment logging is the brain dump so this is also something that I really learned to do during my PhD and this is whenever you sit down for a full work day or at the end of a work day you kind of dump all the information that you have

in your brain about the experiment that you're considering so these are usually to-dos that I think I need to do doubts I have about the experiment that I'm going to do what I think throughout that day I will learn or kind of what I have to consider and also a lot of times I write down what I think can go wrong and by considering what I think can go wrong during the experiment I'm already considering ideas or hypothesis about what would be the following up steps if that thing indeed goes wrong and I just dump

that all down in the morning for about 5 minutes so in general I would set a dedicated time to do this and I think a natural time is or the morning or the evening but if you have another time for example of coffee break that you can do this this is also fine of course and then if you want to take it one step further you can also visually organize them so or in colors or kind of create these type of brain map and then through these visual maps you can kind of see the connection

between different ideas and between different problems that you're currently having and lastly something that I learned during my PhD which I found really useful actually in daily life is the idea of resource logging so the idea of resource documentation or research logging is that throughout any learning process you log or take a record of all the resources that you use and this is mainly because at the end of learning something you usually forget what you've used to get there and resource logging can be anything so it can be YouTube videos that you watch it can

be papers that you read it can even be people that you talk to but to have a dedicated place where you note down all of these resources and one added benefit of this is that you can usually share this resource then with anyone else that is trying to learn the same skill as you or give them a dedicated pathway that you've used to learn this skill and I think this just makes you a really nice person for sharing this resource but it's also at least in my view really rewarding to have something that you can

share to other people to get to the place that you are at currently so usually I keep this resource database for example for Neuroscience I have one dedicated database on notion that I will share at some point and also I gave it actually stars for different resources that I used to see how useful I found them so some of them I give five stars and others to to differentiate between their usefulness so the Second Step that I learned or the second stage in the scientific writing process or journaling process is this idea of continuous logging

uh so the idea of continuous logging is that you keep writing down FS you have about that experiment as you are conducting it and this is really because as you are conducting different types of experiments you actually come up with ideas throughout the experiments that you forget if you don't immediately note them down so the first part then of this is to have this real time idea capture as soon as you have ideas write these ideas down whether you're on a walk or during work or even during cooking don't wait for a dedicated time but

just write them down immediately and this is really because you forget these are ideas and also because usually when you're actually not working the best ideas come to you so for me this is usually when I'm on a bicycle and when I'm riding through the city I actually come up with quite some ideas about how to solve some of the problems that I'm currently having and the way to do this is you can use a mobile phone app I find as you have your phone usually on you this the easiest way and you just take

a quick voice note or you do the dictate function such that it's immediately transferred to text the idea behind this is really to have this incremental inside building so I really truly believe that a thousand tiny ideas will eventually lead you to your one big idea but without capturing these thousand tiny ideas first you won't be able to capture the big idea so usually these tiny ideas pop up throughout the day and you want to note them all down and also to see if you can relate them into larger bigger Concepts so one thing I'm

experimenting with also currently is to have these dedicated pocket notebook books for an experiment or for a problem that I'm working on so often times I have this larger encompassing problem so for example how does the brain work and this is an problem that will probably continue to hunt me throughout the next coming years so you just need a tiny notebook for this and also it I find that to have different notebooks for different problems is really nice the only thing I do want to warn you with about is that I'm personally quite messy and

I do find it hard to keep them all like clean and not to have overlapping ideas in different notebooks but I think that's also okay that's also part of the process of learning of how you like to journal and how you like to write about problems so the last thing that I learned in scientific not taking or scientific journaling is is idea of having reflection moments or weekly reflection in my case and that's really to come back to all the notes you've taken throughout the week and to combine them into one coherent framework and also

to pick out the ideas that you really like so a lot of times when we're journaling at least in my case I kind of forget what I journaled about and if I don't revisit it these ideas will just be forgotten basically so it's nice to have a time at the end of the week for example to transfer all your ideas from various mediums into a Consolidated log and to regularly review and update your log book to reinforce learning for example identify patterns and track your own growth so I think this reflection moment you can do

it as long or as short as you want to and I usually do it before I meet my professor because usually at that time I need to tell him all the results and ideas that I had and I find it really useful to about an hour before the meeting go through all of the work that I've made and all the ideas that I came up with and also to discuss maybe some of the worries or some of the troubles that I faced so you would want to summarize some key insights and action points from the

week to guite also your future experiments and future logs so what do you want to take to the next week and also go over some of the ideas that you really like and maybe reflect on those a little bit and also a big thing I want to say is don't cross out any of the previous ideas that you have that you currently don't like cuz I find often that as you change yourself throughout time if you go back to some really old notebooks it's actually really nice to see some of the thoughts you were having

and sometimes these thoughts are actually more valuable at this moment than you estimated them to be at the previous moments and lastly as I already said so I share a lot of the ideas that I had about experiments and I do think this process of sharing and reflecting together with another person is actually really nice and if you're doing experiments in real life about real problems and about scientific problems of course this doesn't have to be your professor as I mentioned but it can for example also be your partner or a friend that is working

on the same type of problems or doing the same type of Life experiments as you are doing and I think reflecting together about solutions that you can probably implement in the next week or how to go about your next set of experiments or how to face some problems you're having it's actually really nice and can give you another set of I to review these problems so as I've gone through my scientific journey I really noticed that some of the skills that I learned in science are now transferring to daily life and this is one of

the ones that I noticed but I'm really curious if you are something else besides a scientist if you've noticed that some of the skills that you learned in your day job are transferring to real time or to your real life and if some of these skills that you found are transferable to parts that you didn't expect them to be transferable to so if you have such a skill I would love to know so please put it down below and also let me know what you think about this journaling method and otherwise see you next week

bye