James Ashworth
Your notes are only useful if you can find them again
Most of us begin a piece with good intentions. You open a document, jot down a few thoughts, paste in a link, save a PDF someone emailed you, and promise to tidy it all up later. Later arrives three days before deadline, and you are scrolling through a folder called "research misc" trying to remember which interview the quote about council budgets came from.
The fix is not a cleverer app. It is a system you can maintain when you are tired, rushed and slightly panicked. Three moving parts do most of the work: folders, tags and a citation record. Get those right and drafting becomes assembly rather than archaeology.
The one rule that matters: every note gets a home within a minute of arriving. If it doesn't, it doesn't exist.
Folders: build the spine first
Folders do one job — they tell you where a thing lives. Keep the structure shallow, no more than three levels deep, and name files so they sort sensibly.
- 01 Planning — briefs, pitches, angles you have since abandoned.
- 02 Sources — reports, documents, press releases, each in its own file.
- 03 Interviews — one file per person or conversation, never a single running document.
- 04 Quotes — the lines you intend to use, pulled out as you go.
- 05 Drafts — numbered versions, so you never overwrite good work.
File names matter more than folder names. Lead with the date, then the source: 2025-03-14-interview-harris-transport.txt. Dates sort chronologically, names sort alphabetically, and you can search for either. Skip spaces, and avoid "final", "FINAL2" and "new". A version number is honest. "Final" is a lie you will tell yourself four more times before the piece goes out.
Tags: the layer folders can't give you
Folders force one location per note, but real research isn't like that. A single quote might be evidence about housing, a strong line for your opening, and something you still need to check.
That is what tags are for. They cut across folders. Keep the set small and closed — ten or fewer — and resist inventing new ones halfway through a project.
- #quote — usable verbatim, properly attributed.
- #stat — a number to double-check before publishing.
- #context — background, colour, atmosphere.
- #verify — claims you have not yet confirmed.
- #kicker — lines with energy that might end a section.
Keep tags lowercase, one word where possible, and put them at the top of each note rather than scattered through the body. When you start drafting, you can call up every #kicker in one view and choose between them in seconds instead of rereading three thousand words of transcript.
Interviews: capture more than the words
Interviews are your most valuable and most fragile material. A transcript with no timestamps and no speaker labels is a trap waiting to spring.
Whatever your method — recorder plus notebook, a transcription service, or pen and paper — keep these four things attached to every conversation:
- Who, when, where and how (phone, video, in person).
- Speaker labels throughout, not just at the start.
- Timestamps for the lines you plan to use, so you can find them again.
- Your own notes kept separate: what they said, what they meant, what they dodged.
If you are working from a recording, spend fifteen minutes straight after the call pulling out the five best lines. That is when your memory is sharpest. You will not remember which minute it sat on next Tuesday, and you certainly won't remember it a fortnight later when the editor asks for a stronger quote.
A citation record you'll actually keep
Plagiarism and misattribution are usually accidents of bad bookkeeping rather than bad character. The cure is one source register — a spreadsheet, a plain text file, a notebook, whatever you will genuinely maintain — with a row per source.
For each, record the author or organisation, title, publication, date published, date you accessed it, page or paragraph, and where the file sits on your machine. For anything online, save a copy or a screenshot too. Pages change, vanish, or disappear behind a paywall, and a bare link is not evidence.
When you take a quote, write it exactly as it appears, wrap it in quotation marks immediately, and put the source name right beside it. Never paraphrase inside quotation marks, and never tidy someone's grammar without flagging the change. If you must cut words, use an ellipsis so future-you knows what you did.
A weekly tidy and a clean handover
Systems rot quietly. Twenty minutes at the end of each week keeps yours alive.
- Empty the downloads folder and the desktop.
- File anything unsorted, with a date and a name.
- Tag anything untagged, and close out #verify items you have since confirmed.
- Delete duplicates and obvious dead ends without sentiment.
Then, before you draft, do one deliberate handover. Open your 04 Quotes file, your #kicker list and your source register side by side. Copy the material you actually intend to use into a fresh document, roughly in the order you expect it to appear. This gives you a skeleton to write against, and it shows you in about ten minutes where the gaps are. Better to discover you are missing a dissenting voice now than two hours before the piece is due.
