How to take notes while reading online

27 October 2026 · by Mito

Good thoughts tend to arrive in the middle of reading. Halfway through an article, a line in the documentation, a paragraph in a long PDF. These five habits help you catch them, and still have them next week.

1. Keep your notebook right beside the page

The best moment to write a thought down is the moment you have it. Keep your notes where your eyes already are: next to the text, in the same window. A notebook in the browser's sidebar does exactly that, and your place on the page stays where it was.

2. Write it in your own words

Copying a sentence feels productive. Rewriting it is what makes it stay. In a well-known study, Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014) found that students who typed lectures almost word for word understood the ideas less well than students who wrote fewer notes in their own words. Later studies found the effect smaller than first reported, but the advice holds up: put the idea into a sentence you would say out loud.

3. One heading for each idea

Start a new heading whenever the text moves to a new idea, and keep two or three short points under it. A page of notes then reads like a map of the article, and you find your way back in seconds.

4. Keep the exact words when they matter

Some sentences are worth keeping exactly: a definition, a number, a line you want to quote. Keep those as a quote, with a link back to where you found it. Everything around them stays in your own words.

5. Take a short break, then come back

Long reading wears down attention. In a study by Ariga and Lleras (2011), people who briefly switched to something else twice during a long, dull task kept their focus, while those who stayed on it the whole time slowly lost it. Two minutes away from the text, then back to it with fresh eyes.

How Glacier helps with all five

Glacier is a paper notebook in your browser's sidebar, made for exactly this. It sits beside the page you're reading, and each page keeps its own note for when you come back. Type # for a heading and - for a point. Select a sentence and pick Clip to Glacier, and it arrives as a quote with its link. And when your head is full, type /break for a two minute game on the paper you write on.