My Comps Study Notes Are a Disaster

I have four note-taking systems for my comps. None of them talk to each other. There is a physical notebook where I write by hand in blue ink and then go back and scribble corrections in black when I realize I was wrong. There is a folder of printed papers with sticky notes sticking out at every angle, some of them so old the adhesive has dried and they fall off when I open the folder. There is an Obsidian vault with about sixty linked notes, except the links are broken on a third of them because I renamed a file and never updated the backlinks. And there is a plain text file called final_notes_REAL_v3_FINAL_actuallyfinal.md that I open every few days, add a paragraph to, close without saving to the right directory, and then panic-find later with Spotlight. If I walked into the exam room tomorrow and my success depended on the cleanliness of my notes, I would fail in the first five minutes.

I realized something about this setup while I was reviewing the RBV section for probably the fifth time. The Resource Based View, Barney (1991) and Bharadwaj (2000), is straightforward enough on the page. VRIN characteristics, not types, with IT capability as the bundle that stays inimitable even when infrastructure is a commodity. But my RBV notes have a question written in the margin in tiny, angry handwriting: "but what happens when the environment shifts?" That is not a question about RBV. That is a question about dynamic capabilities, Teece et al. (1997), which sits three topics away in my study plan. I was reading about resource possession and my brain refused to stay there. It wanted to know about reconfiguration. So it wrote a question in the margin that connected two theories I had not yet figured out how to connect cleanly.

The same thing happened with structuration theory. I had Orlikowski (1992) spread across my desk, trying to trace the duality of structure through the three modalities of signification, domination, and legitimation. And there, in the middle of the page, I drew an arrow from the legitimation column straight to the margin where I had written "see DiMaggio & Powell 1983." My brain saw the link before I did. Institutional theory explains why organizations converge on similar structures through coercive, mimetic, and normative pressures. Structuration explains how those structures are enacted and changed through practice. The two theories answer different questions about the same phenomenon, one about the pressure to conform and the other about the mechanism of enactment. But my notes did not put them in a tidy table. My notes had an arrow and a question mark and a note that just said "connection?" with no resolution at all.

Affordance theory was worse. I read Markus and Silver (2008) and understood the three way distinction between technical objects, functional affordances, and symbolic expressions. The insistence that an affordance requires both an actor and a goal before it counts as a real affordance and not just a feature. I nodded along. I wrote clean notes. Then at the bottom of the page I wrote "see also Markus & Silver" as if I had discovered something, except the paper I was reading was Markus and Silver. I meant something else. I meant see also the way they apply this to GenAI, which is a context they did not write about but that the Sidorova final guide applies their logic to. My note was a pointer to a connection I had not finished thinking through. It still is.

I have tried to clean this up three times. The first time I decided to use a single system: everything goes into Obsidian, tagged, linked, with a daily note as the entry point. That lasted about two weeks before I was printing papers again because reading on a screen for eight hours made my eyes hurt and I needed to move around the room with a highlighter. The second time I decided to go fully analog: one notebook, one pen, color coded tabs for each topic. That worked until I needed to search across 180 papers for every mention of the word delegation and realized my handwriting does not scale. The third time I tried a hybrid: digital for search and storage, paper for first pass reading and annotation. That is where I landed and it is where I still am, but let me be honest, hybrid in practice means I have a stack of paper on my desk, a folder of half synced markdown files, and a lingering suspicion that somewhere in the pile is a connection I made three weeks ago that I am going to need tomorrow and will not find.

The thing that finally made me stop apologizing for this mess was Burton-Jones et al. (2021), specifically their argument about shifting from theory as a product to theory as a conversation. They are talking about how the IS discipline should theorize, but the idea applies to studying itself. If theory is a conversation, then my notes should look like a conversation, not a filing cabinet. Conversations loop back. They interrupt themselves. They say wait, what about this other thing, and draw arrows in the margin. A clean outline is the output after the conversation is finished. A mess of cross-references is the conversation happening.

I keep returning to one line from the day1 page on my study hub. Under the structuration and institutional theory section, there is a Persian cue that says, translated roughly, "dont mix theories as synonyms. State the mechanism." That stuck with me because it is the exact reason my notes look the way they do. I am not trying to produce a synonym table. I am trying to state the mechanism. And the mechanism is rarely visible on the first pass. It emerges when RBV notes have dynamic capability questions in the margin and structuration notes have arrows pointing to institutional theory and affordance notes say see also the same author I just cited, because what I actually meant was see the implication I have not yet articulated.

I am not going to tell you that the fourth system finally worked. It did not. I am still using four systems. What changed is that I stopped treating the mess as something to fix and started treating it as evidence of what my brain is actually doing. When I see a sticky note on a printed paper that says "is this the same as the Carr argument?" and the sticky note is attached to a paper about GenAI adoption, I know I am doing something right. I am in the messy middle where the connections are not clean yet. The clean version comes later, and only if I need it.

For the exam, I will build the clean outlines. I know the formulas, the five theory types from Gregor (2006), the three causal stances from Markus and Robey (1988), the VRIN characteristics from Barney (1991), the sensing seizing transforming from Teece et al. (1997), the technical objects and functional affordances from Markus and Silver (2008). I can write those cleanly. But the learning that got me there was not clean. It was the page with three different ink colors and a question that led to a different theory altogether. The exam will ask me to compare RBV and dynamic capabilities, and I will give a clean answer because I spent weeks with the messy one. The outline is the final draft. The margin notes were the real work.