Organize Your Notes With The Seek, Sort And Stack Approach Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach podcast

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Organize Your Notes with the Seek, Sort and Stack Approach

12d ago 9:49

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An idea pops into your head, so you grab whatever paper product lies nearby and scribble down the thought. Or you come across a quote, story, or stat and realize it connects to your project. Convinced it’s all great material, you jot it down, then stuff the paper into your pocket or purse.

Now you’re ready to write, but you’re discovering random Post-Its, index cards, and the backs of envelopes—not to mention pages from notebooks and journals. And you’re wondering how these scattered notes and ideas could possibly be organized into a coherent structure for your article, essay, book, or blog post.

Where do you start?

Today, I’ll suggest one method to organize your notes. Let’s call it the Seek, Sort, and Stack approach.

What’s Your Big Idea or Driving Question?

For a specific project, a big idea or driving question has been guiding your note-taking, even if subconsciously. Given that, there are two primary approaches to organizing all your material:

Top-down: Begin by creating a working outline based on that big idea and slot individual bits where they belong
Bottom-up: Start with the individual pieces you’ve amassed, sorting them until they reveal a structure, then creating an outline that supports the big idea after the cards are in place

Most writers benefit from a hybrid approach—sorting enough to see patterns emerge, then crafting an outline that evolves as they continue developing the project.

But we’ll assume you’re taking a mostly bottom-up approach, creating an outline after you discover what you’ve got.

Analog Advantage: How Paper Notes Work

When I taught high school composition, my small class of home-schooled students balked at my insistence they use physical index cards during their research. “Why not just use Google Docs?” they’d protest. Index cards seemed outdated and archaic, like trading smartphones for carrier pigeons.

When “working-outline” day arrived, they began their top-down approach of physically moving cards to align with their term paper’s sections. One card might have a quote that worked perfectly in either the introduction or conclusion; a statistic might strengthen two different arguments. With this analog system, they could move the quote and statistic cards to one stack, over to another and back again until they determined the best spot.

On that day, most of them changed their minds about my old school method. They appreciated the freedom of rearranging ideas without scrolling through digital text. The analog method felt more like a puzzle as the card-sorting revealed holes in their research.

I’m not the only one recommending this old school technique. Ryan Holiday, bestselling author of books like The Obstacle Is the Way, swears by this analog method. He records notes on index cards he stores in a big box. When developing a new manuscript, he physically sorts and stacks these cards across a huge desk, finding connections until he lands on a flow that fits.

Seek, Sort, and Stack works well for a lot of writers. I suggest you try it at least once to see if it works for you.

Seek out the Scraps

How do you begin? First, collect every relevant note in one physical location.

Chances are, your notes aren’t recorded on index cards and tucked neatly into a box like Ryan’s modular system. If you’re like me, your handwritten notes are strewn about in various formats and locations:

a quote thumb-typed into your phone’s Notes app
barely legible lines scribbled on crumpled receipts in your wallet
a quote on a sticky note stuck to your monitor
annotation in the margins of books.

That’s okay. Seek out all the pertinent bits and assemble them in one place.

Empty your backpack. Swing past your bedside table midnight inspiration. Dig through your coat pockets and your purse. Check your phone’s notes app. Maybe you shoved some ideas in a drawer or shoe box months ago.

This gathering stage is crucial—after all, you can’t organize what you can’t see.

Sort & Stack

With everything visible, begin sorting each idea into thematic stacks. Don’t waste time copying everything onto uniform cards (though transferring crucial info from awkward scraps like a coffee-stained napkin might help).

For digital notes, create physical placeholders—in this case, index cards with keywords and source locations might be useful—so they integrate into your physical sorting system.

Ask yourself how each piece connects to your project’s central question. For example, if your work in progress is exploring how hard it is to live a slower lifestyle in our hectic culture, perhaps you’ve got notes on a minimalist’s philosophy, a nun’s contemplative insights, a psychologist’s concerns about technology speeding up our brains faster than they can handle.

The beauty of physically sorting is that you can see everything at once. Spread your notes across a table, floor, or even tape them to a big window or wall. Step back and observe the patterns.

As themes and topics emerge, you might discover you have seven different notes about morning routines that emphasize thoughtful starts to the day over rushed efficiency and productivity. Maybe that could be a chapter? A story about unhurried meals might suggest a chapter on slowing down our eating or simply serve as an introductory hook. And those concerns about technology speeding up our brains? Well, that’s why you’re going analog and slowing down this whole process.

Organize & Outline

Consider the most effective organization for these previously scattered notes and ideas. Now that they’re grouped, would it make sense to organize them chronologically? Thematically? Should you layer on a problem-solution outline or cause-effect?

What flow leads your reader through the ideas to a satisfying conclusion? This bottom-up approach leads you to create an outline based on how you’ve arranged your sorted stacks.

Transfer to Digital

Using your solidified outline, create a digital document with your working title and add section (or chapter) headings reflecting your outline. Then begin typing into the document each idea you preserved on those scraps of paper.

As you transfer each note to its digital home, include source information for proper attribution—as you now know, I did teach composition, so I urge you to give credit where credit is due.

This digital transfer stage serves as a change to refine your thoughts—you’ll naturally spot satisfying connections and holes in your logic as you develop and strengthen your claims.

Store your original stacks in a box and stick it on a closet shelf or shove it under a bed—they served their primary purpose contributing to this writing project. Keep it for just a little while longer in case you need to reference them later.

And celebrate this milestone: You’ve transformed your messy, chaotic fragments into a structured plan!

Write and Refine

Then comes the even more creative stage: with the content in place, you can craft your language and fill in gaps between ideas.

Best of all, you’re no longer worried you’ve forgotten some key piece of information stuffed in your wallet. Because you did the work of seeking, sorting, and stacking to develop your outline, you’re free to truly write—and with more clarity, ease, and speed.

Turn That Mess into Meaning

The Seek, Sort, and Stack approach honors your initial impulse to capture ideas by providing a method to transform scattered thoughts into structured prose.

All those notes are signaling you have something to say. Now it’s time to turn that mess into meaning—which is the work of a writer, as you figure out what to say and how to say it.

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