Client Spotlight: Katie Burkhart is an essentialist thinker, author, and founder of MatterLogic, a company and system that redesigns the way we work and run our businesses so we can thrive in the value economy. An Authority Accelerator client, she wrote Trying to Do Everything Is Slowly Killing Your Business for Entrepreneur.

Well, hello, ,

Sometimes, the most effective way to accomplish a goal is the least efficient.

Yeah.

Go ahead and sit with that for a minute.

It is not the message our productivity-loving, always-on-the-go hustle culture promotes.

But it's true.

The most efficient way to hike to the top of Mount Washington (the highest peak in New England) is the Lion's Head Trail. The hike to the summit is just over four miles. But it's straight up the mountain, and you've got to scramble over boulders and climb sheer rock faces to make it.

If my goal is to summit Mount Washington, the Lion's Head Trail won't get me there. I don't have the required experience, upper body strength, or fitness level.

The most effective way for me to summit Mount Washington is to take the Jewell Trail. At just over five miles, with few steep sections, it is the easiest way to ascend Mount Washington. It's not as efficient as Lion's Head, but it's a trail I can safely manage. (At least during the summer months.)

I've been thinking about the differences between effectiveness and efficiency a lot, especially as it relates to writing, research, and business.

Countless tools on the market promise to make us more productive by making more efficient use of our time. That sounds good at first, but that promise values quantity over quality. It's all about doing more, having more, and being more.

It's fucking exhausting.

I don't want to have more time so I can do more and more things. I want to take the time to do the things I enjoy doing and do them well. I am happy to choose the efficient route when it is also the most effective, especially if it helps me do something I don't want to do faster! But if I have to choose between being effective and being efficient, I'll choose effective every single time.

When it comes to capturing my ideas and organizing my research, the way that is most effective for me is not terribly efficient. Paper is my favorite piece of human technology. (If you're curious about the history of paper, I highly recommend Paper: Paging Through History by Mark Kurlansky.) It's portable, unconcerned with power or internet reliability, and tangible, so I'm less likely to forget about it.

I have a slew of notebooks, sticky notes, and index cards, and yet if one isn't immediately available, I'll write on the back of an envelope, a scrap piece of paper, or on a cardboard box. It's messy, but it works because it captures a fleeting idea before I forget it. And if I have to open an app on my phone or get to my computer to capture an idea, I'll forget it before I can even log in.

But my way may not be your way.

So, here are a few ways to capture your ideas and insights and organize your research. The approach that is most effective for you is the one you'll actually use. Even if it's messy and not terribly efficient.

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Capturing Your Ideas and Insights

The most effective way to demonstrate your depth of knowledge is to share your ideas and insights. You can do this through writing articles, posting on social media, publishing a book, hosting a podcast (or being a guest), speaking at conferences, or facilitating a workshop. Your goal is to add to the conversation instead of adding to the noise.

Your goal is to provide real value to your audience. To do that, you need to share actionable insights. And you need to share these insights in slightly different ways again and again and again. Because repetition builds your reputation.

Finding new and interesting ways to share the same old ideas requires you to be intentional. You must look for inspiration everywhere and actively read or listen to material about your industry. And you must capture your sources, quotes, research notes, and insights so you can refer back to them. Over time, you'll start to see your research notes as a conversation, and you'll begin to connect the dots in new ways.

Capturing and organizing this information can be a challenge. When I shared this challenge on LinkedIn, I shared a bit about the tools I use to meet it and asked others to share the tools they use. Here are X ways you can start capturing and organizing your research, ideas, and insights:

1. A research journal. A research journal is a simple document that captures your sources, quotes, research notes, and insights. Keep topic-specific research journals that can evolve along with your learning. For each source, include a complete bibliography. Next, capture relevant quotes. Finally, write down your thoughts and insights.

Download my research journal template.

2. Online reference managers. There are several citation managers on the market. While they are available to anyone, they are popular among academics because they can pull information directly from the university's library. Here are three of the most common:

Mendeley Reference Manager is free desktop software that allows users to organize and store their references, create bibliographies and citations, and share their research with others. (This social aspect is quite popular with researchers.) It has a built-in PDF reader, making it easy to annotate and organize PDFs.

PowerNotes is a $10/month subscription service that allows users to create notes and organize them by project, topic, or source. It has a built-in citation tool that can automatically format citations in multiple styles and can capture content from across the web.

Zotero is free, open-source desktop software developed by a nonprofit organization. It allows users to collect, organize, annotate, cite, and share research. It is similar to Mendeley but easier to learn. It has a browser add-on for Firefox and Chrome.

3. Alternative platforms. Many people use other online tools to collect and organize their research, ideas, and insights. These tools tend to have a number of features that allow you to customize your experience (which can be both a blessing and a curse):

Evernote is a free note-taking and task-management application that archives and creates notes with embedded photos, audio, and saved web content. Notes are stored in topic-specific notebooks and can be tagged, annotated, edited, searched, and exported. The web clipper is especially helpful.

Notion is a free or low-cost project management, productivity, and note-taking web application with a ton of features, buckets of templates, and infinite flexibility. It organizes information hierarchically, allowing you to nest pages within other pages. It is popular with solo professionals and creative teams.

Walling is a free or low-cost web application similar to Notion. But instead of presenting information in a linear, hierarchical format, it is organized visually with the option to view information linearly. You can use each brick in a topic-specific wall to capture the source, quotes, and notes.

While it is important to capture your research, it's even more crucial to capture your response to that research — your insights. Your insights are how you formulate your point of view or note areas requiring additional study. It's where you begin to identify the gaps in the research or poke holes in other people's conclusions. It's where you figure out what you can add to the conversation that is uniquely yours.

To unearth your insights, take note of quotes that capture your attention and then explain why they caught your attention. One way to do this is to review each quote and write a statement that starts with "yes, and," "yes, but," or "no, because." Those simple prompts help you dig deeper and bring more nuance to the conversation.

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"Creativity . . . consists largely on rearranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know. To think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted"

~ George F. Kneller, The Art and Science of Creativity

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Upcoming Events

Pitched to Published™ 

Interested in learning how to pitch, write, and publish articles for industry trade journals and high-visibility publications? Join me Wednesday, November 8 at 11:55 AM Eastern for a free mini-training on what to do once your first article is published, followed by Q+A. Register here.

Masterclass: How to Write for High-Visibility Publications

In this free one-hour masterclass, I share my proprietary SILVA Method™ and walk you step-by-step through the process that helped my clients start writing for publications like Harvard Business Review, Inc., and Entrepreneur. It's a live event, so please bring your questions! Register here.

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That's all for now! If you're a consultant who would like to be a sought-after expert, email me or book a call. 

Take good care,

P.S. Are you looking for guest experts? If you have a community of consultants, I'd love to show them how to develop their body of work or write for high-visibility publications like Harvard Business Review. Hit reply, and let's talk!