2.3 help out your short term memory: task managers
whether you put all your tasks in a notebook, app, or on the back of various receipts, many of us want some sort of system to capture all that we need to do. task managers will do you one better by storing that information, and sending it back to you when you can actually take action on it. simply put, your brain cannot hold it all - so why not give it some help??
learn all about task managers in this week's episode!
mentioned in the show:
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Whether you scribble them on a notebook, whether you shout reminders into your phone or invest in a piece of software to help you manage it. I think that there is one thing that can save so much brain power and energy, and that is a system for containing your tasks. So in this week's episode, let's talk about task managers.
📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
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The task manager is exactly what it sounds like. It's a system that helps you manage what things you need to do. And the secret about a task manager is that while it also tells you what things you need to do, and when, it really helps you get into the habit of estimating your time and energy and various other resources that you need in order to do those tasks.
It's when everything's in one place -and it doesn't really matter what that place is, but we'll talk about some of the pros and cons of various different ones in a minute - but when everything's in one place, you can start to see, okay, this is too much for one day or, I have a little bit of space here. What can I do? It's the first step in gaining some visibility into how you're working and then maybe making some changes that might be more sustainable in the long run.
So a task manager can be very simple. It can be a notebook. The bullet journal is a task management system, for example, which is just a notebook that you keep a running list of moving tasks from day to day, as you need to, or want to. It can be a system that's even more chaotic than that, which is various notepads or receipts, and jotted down notes in your phone.
But it can also be a very complicated system that you invest a lot of time and maybe even some money in setting up. Something like Asana or Trello or click up, which has projects and boards and recurring features that help you do a little bit more advanced things, but no matter which tool you use to do it, I do think that test managers have a lot of benefits.
And here are the ways that I think you can think about using them. And if any of these appeal to you, then it might be time for you to invest in a task manager. So the first is maybe the most simple, but can be the most revolutionary: it's capturing tasks. I don't know about you, but my brain likes to spit up reminders of things that I need to do or could do or should do at the most inconvenient times. I'll be in the shower and thinking about how it's somebody's birthday next week. I could be writing, thinking about how I need to schedule that dentist appointment.
But if I have a task manager, then I have a central place to send all of those random brain injections of things I need to do. And I can deal with them in a time and place of my choosing. So that might look like quickly opening up my task manager or yelling into my phone "buy birthday present" or "go to the dentist" and then dealing with it afterwards.
But capturing tasks as a regular part of your workflow really starts to pay off, not just for the random life things that you also need to keep doing while you are a grad student, but for the things that are so easy to slip your mind. You see a CFP in your email. And so you send it into your task manager and say, okay, remind me to work on this in three weeks when I'm going to have a little bit more time and then boom.
You remember it and not just because they send you a 12 hours left to submit email. So if all of your tasks are going to the same place, it's easier to see them and then have a system for scheduling them in a way that makes sense for your rhythm.
You can also remind yourself to do the tasks that might not occur to you. So in my task manager, every Friday, it reminds me to clean up my office and especially clean out my downloads folder because I am notorious for leaving everything in my downloads folder. So every task manager that I set up has this recurring task on Friday, that reminds me to do this thing that's important, but would honestly never occur to me. And honestly, doesn't seem that fun most of the time, but if it's there, I can sometimes snooze it. I can move it to Monday or I can do it on Thursday if I'm feeling really motivated, but it regularly reminds me to do these kinds of tasks that would have otherwise slipped my mind.
Task managers are really great for the non urgent, but important tasks that really never seem to rise to the top of your anxiety stack. So. If you know that you have to grade five papers by tomorrow or else there will be severe consequences. You probably don't need a task manager to remind you of that. But if you have things like, don't forget to double check that my paperwork was submitted on time. That's the kind of task that a task manager is really going to excel at because it wouldn't have otherwise occurred to you, but it's still really important to do.
So I think that most people, most of the time are going to benefit from some sort of a task management system. I don't think that everyone needs a piece of software. I don't think that everyone needs a special app on their phone. A notebook can be just fine for some people. But if you do have a little bit more capacity in your workflow points, like if you have a little bit of an interest using a piece of software, especially one that links with your phone can be really useful.
So ToDoIst is one of my favorites. It has a pretty generous free plan, but it's basically just a to-do list. You can separate things out into categories, but it's just a running to-do list. There aren't a lot of bells and whistles, so you can't create too complicated a system. If you're working on a team, something like a sauna can be great because you can have shared work boards. You can collaborate, you can assign tasks to different people. It might be a little bit high-powered for one person, but if you've liked the way it looks and the way it functions also has a group, a great free program.
Trello is along the same lines, especially a great for people who like a Kanban style board of task managers, where you have categories for not started, in progress and done, which can be really motivating. And you can get as fancy as something like ClickUp or monday.com, which has all kinds of automations and trigger functions that are cool to play with, but maybe a little bit high powered for what you need to do.
But no matter what task manager you pick, I do think that having some sort of integration between your phone and your computer can be really helpful if only because your brain will spit out reminders about your dissertation and vice versa. When you're at your desk or when you're not. So a phone integration, whether that's an app or a web clipper can be really useful to help you integrate those things no matter where you are at your desk or not.
The bottom line is that a task manager saves you, brainpower. Your short-term memory can't hold all of this information at once. So outsource a little bit of that work to a task manager, so that the entire responsibility of remembering to do all of the details for all of your jobs and all of your human responsibilities, every single day has a backup plan. Thank you so much and I'll see you next week.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
2.2 - there are so many pdfs: citation managers save lives
i make very few recommendations about things i think all scholars should be doing.......but citation managers are one. listen to this episode to find out my reasons why - and learn my favorite piece of software to use (hint, it's free!!) for this. you truly cannot imagine the amount of information you will need to keep organized as a scholar - citation managers are a key part in dealing with that, and can really help you out!
resources mentioned:
step by step tutorial for zotero
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Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
March madness is a month of free writing resources, trackers, dash boards, and prizes. Sign up for free at the link in the show notes.
All I have is anecdotal evidence, but I'm pretty sure that one of the main sources of guilt for academics when it comes to their workflow is how they are or are not using the citation manager.
In fact, the angst goes so deep that I have often joked about making a t-shirt that says the best time to start a citation manager was birth. And the second best time is today. Because so many people feel so locked up about how they are using the software, how they're not using it to its full potential or maybe how they're not using it at all. So let's get into citation managers, how and why you might want to use them. And some of the lesser known features that I think are even more valuable.
Now I make very few universal recommendations as a coach, as in, I think that most people, if not everyone should be using this tool or doing this technique. But citation managers come pretty close. I think that most people, most of the time should be using a citation manager simply because you will encounter so much literature, pieces of research, primary sources, all sorts of things. The material that you accumulate as an academic scholar is mountainous. You can't, you truly can not conceive of how many PDFs you will encounter over the course of a PhD program, or goodness knows a multi-year multi-decade academic career.
So citation manager is simply put a piece of software that stores all of the citeable information about the pieces of information that you have, like title and DOI, And publisher in one place so that you can find them. It's like a list of everything you've checked out from the library, although you control it and you put it in and you don't have to read everything that's in there .
The other thing that citation managers do really well and their first and primary function was to export and automate your citations. So you will interface this piece of software and the most common ones are Zotero, Mendeley, and Endnote. You'll interface a piece of software with your word processor, like Word.
You'll click a button and then it'll automatically insert a properly formatted citation, whether that's a footnote or a work cited, whatever the style demands. Super useful, Right? If all you ever use a citation manager for is to help format your citations, and even if you're inconsistent about what you put into the citation manager, I still think they're a good use of time. They are not perfect for sure. You do often have to adjust a few things. You might have to double check the formatting. But it really helps save both the records of all of the pieces of information that you've come into contact with. And saves you a lot of time when it comes to the actual formatting work.
But there are so many other features of these citation managers that I think deserve some consideration in your reading and research and maybe even writing workflows.
I love the ability to create collections inside of a citation manager. You might create a collection that you share with your department called best texts to teach this topic with, and everybody can update it and it automatically syncs between devices.
I love creating collections for special interests or reading groups or keeping things organized. I love nothing more than organizing bits of information on my computer. Please don't ask me to organize anything in my real physical life. I won't do it, but I will noodle around in my citation manager, making collections.
But the fact that you can share some of these create libraries and keep them updated. So, so useful.
I have what many people would refer to as shiny object syndrome. So I need to keep as much of the information about whatever I'm doing in one program, because the instant that I click out of said program, the more likely it is that I'm going to end up in some wild corner of the internet, where I didn't intend to be.
And I love that citation managers will let me store my notes with them. It's sometimes we'll let you append PDFs. Although the storage of that can get tricky. Storage management is a whole other episode of this podcast, but you can keep your notes right with the citation. So you can remember, oh, that was this edition of the book that had these page numbers, or it was this publication that I was encountering at a conference or whatever.
Your notes can be as detailed or as scant as you want, but having them right by the citation information makes it so much easier to trace your steps back later on. You can also in many of these software programs, Create tags, which can really increase searchability. So I have tags in my citation manager for actually read this or skimmed this, or decided not to read this.
I have tags that refer to different methodologies. I have tags about the decade that something was published in and I have tags about clusters of researchers that published together. So I can see the different schools and it's so useful to then go through and filter and say, okay, show me all of the things that were published in the eighties with this method that came out of this lab.
Boom. It's so hard to do that in any other piece of software and that ability to sort of keep things, add information, add rich metadata can really pay off the more you invest inside of that citation manager, and the bigger that collection is.
This can help you keep track of all of the things that you could and have already read. And as any academic will tell you, managing your reading pile is one of the most daunting and ongoing tasks. You literally never finish it. So having a piece of software that helps you keep track of what you've read, what you've cited, that thing that somebody mentioned to you down the hallway, all really helpful because you can't keep it all in your brain.
Some of it will escape. So the more of it that lands in the citation manager, the more likely it is that you won't have to duplicate that work when you have to go back and say, what was the name of that paper that somebody mentioned in our symposium last week or two weeks ago, or that I taught with a year ago? It'll all be right there.
So I recommend that you store literally everything in your citation manager, the things that you teach with tag them with the syllabis tag them with the semester that you taught at, or the institution that you did. The things that you read in your own courses, the things you read for exams web sources that you come across, book reviews, put it all in there.
It doesn't mean you're going to read it all, but it means it's a central place to go looking when you're trying to piece back your research path.
I really recommend that people use a citation manager, especially if you have a lot of sources, if you are someone who really only has a handful of things and you can keep them all easy in your finger tips, and you really enjoy the process of constructing a citation, go for it. But I really recommend that if you're going to be working with say more than 25 or 30 sources over the course of your scholarly lifetime - And spoiler alert, you will be! - Use the citation manager. Help yourself keep track of some of it.
Now a question that I often get is Katy. I haven't really used my citation manager or I started using it. Do I need to stop everything that I'm doing and spend the next two weeks, putting everything in there and tagging it and note taking it so that it's all there. And my answer is as fun as that sounds, it's actually probably not a good use of your time.
The best thing that I have found is to build it organically, as opposed to trying to create a very elaborate schema. And then putting everything into that citation manager. All of the big three come with a web clipper which goes right into your internet browser. It lets you push a button when you're surfing on a page that, you know, Google scholar or J STOR or wherever you're getting your information and it automatically sends it to your citation manager. You might have to do a little bit of cleanup and tagging to make sure that it's good, but you can with a click of a button automatically import those things. So wherever you are right now, get in the habit of starting to do that. Tag, when you need to use tags, add folders when you need to use folders, but start to build it wherever you are. Because like I said up top the best time to have done this is when you were born and just kept track of everything that you've ever read for your entire life Always. But the second best time is to start investing in it now.
Last, but not least, a software recommendation. I recommend Zotero to everybody because it's free. You don't pay for it. It's a piece of open-source software. It is regularly updated. There's a very robust online support community. I've linked to a bunch of things in the show notes to help you out there.
I also think Zotero is the easiest to use. And I think it's one of the ones that has the most flexibility with what things it pairs with, what word processors, it plays the nicest with other pieces of software that you might use. But you can also check your university library and software showcase because oftentimes they have resources, guides and discounts on software. So it might be that your university really supports EndNote and they give you a great discount on it. That's a good reason to start using it, if that's what makes sense to you.
But definitely look for something that has a web clipper, that has the ability to tag and sort, and you'll be well on your way to having more organized citations . Not just when you're ready to press publish on that paper, but also you're organizing the work and the material of the research process across your many, many projects.
Thanks so much for listening and I will see you next week.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
2.1 - get a tool actually built for drafting: non-linear word processors
Welcome to Season 2 of Grad School is Hard, But...where I give you all my best tools to make things a little less hard. To kick things off, we're talking about non-linear word processors. If you've ever done any of the following: completely lost where you were in the document; scrolled up and down for seeming minutes, trying to find where you left off; got completely confused; duplicated text; moved things around that you shouldn't have; gotten really overwhelmed, trying to start at the beginning; mixed up versions; mixed up drafts; then maybe a non-linear word processor is the way to go.
Mentioned in the episode:
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Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar. And in season two, I'll introduce you to various tools that might make the hard stuff from writing to managing your time to taking care of your brain just a little bit easier.
March madness is a month of free writing resources, trackers, dash boards, and prizes. Sign up for free at the link in the show notes.
In this week's episode, I am going to let you in on one of the biggest secrets that I have about writing long, complicated academic projects. Don't do it in Word. Or Pages or Libre Office or any of your more standard word processors. Now, if it's working for you and you feel like it's fine. There's no bumps at all. Feel free to skip the rest of this episode, and catch me back next week.
But if you have ever done any of the following: completely lost where you were in the document; scrolled up and down for seeming minutes, trying to find where you left off; got completely confused; duplicated text; moved things around that you shouldn't have; gotten really overwhelmed, trying to start at the beginning; Mixed up versions; mixed up drafts; then maybe a non-linear word processor is the way to go. Now by nonlinear word processor, what I mean is a piece of software that makes it easy for you to create collections of smaller bits of text that you then assemble into a longer, more linear draft.
Word and all of its other competitors are pieces of software that in my opinion are really great for things like formatting, sharing your work back and forth, once you have a draft that's all in a straight line. That has a beginning, a middle and an end. And you feel like the order is more or less locked in.
Other pieces of software can help you so much in the earlier drafting phases. Because they let you do things like create smaller documents that you remix and shuffle around to create new organizational schema. It might let you see more than one document open at a time so that you can compare or write directly from your notes or your outline. They might let you put all of your notes, outlines, research, sources, everything all in one place to minimize, clicking out, and therefore getting stuck in whatever sticky parts of the internet or your computer you tend to get stuck in.
These tools are meant to support the earlier messier non-linear phases of drafting. Where you might have a project that could turn into a conference paper and also a dissertation chapter and maybe a guest lecture. And instead of having 15 different word documents labeled: early draft, crappy draft, final draft, final, final draft, final draft for lecture. You get what I mean! You have everything all in one place that you can export and move around as you want to.
The first and most popular version of this software is something called Scrivener, which is definitely paid software. You do have to pay to use it. However it has some of the most generous trial policies that I've ever seen. But other pieces of software that would fall under this umbrella of non-linear word processors are Evernote, Notion, Obsidian could be used this way. Even Google docs has some pretty cool hyperlink functions and folder structures that you can use to replicate.
These tools are good for a couple of things, and I'm going to list them out now. Number one, I think they're good for projects that have a lot of possible formats. Whether that's possible organizational structures, whether you're going to start with this case study or that case study.
Or, you know, this is a body of research that might have four or five different related, but distinct outputs, like a conference paper, a chapter, so on and so forth. It lets you shuffle and see all of these things, keep them together and keep them with the research that they belong to so that you're not trying to manage a thousand different files with slight but meaningful differences.
Number two. I think that this kind of software is particularly awesome for people who want to create really dense links between their research notes, outlines, primary sources to help them see and work with these things more completely. So if you're a scientist and you have A paper that you're supposed to be doing. And it has the same seven sections every time - this might not be necessary for you.
But if you are an anthropologist or historian or an archivist or a person who works with interviews that you're coding, it can be really helpful to have a piece of software that organizes itself around all of the different things that feed into your writing for those early draft stages. So for example, when I was using Scrivener, I would have four panes open at any one time, all within the same document window.
I would have the draft I was actually working on. A scratch pad so that I could capture any notes and things that come up because my brain is very busy while I'm writing. It would have the original source that I was thinking about. And also the long outline that I was working from. And I didn't have to have those in four different Word documents. They were all there in one thing so that I could see them and bounce between them.
This is great. If you, like I mentioned, tend to get stuck when you click out of a document and then suddenly you're in the rest of your life and not doing your writing.
The other function that these are really, really good for are when you are feeling completely overwhelmed about where to start.
The worst thing about opening up a blank document, calling it dissertation proposal, and then trying to start writing is that naturally you're going to start writing at the beginning. And beginnings are some of the hardest parts. I never recommend that people start with the beginning unless they have a really good reason to, I always say write from whatever feels the clearest to you.
It might be the subsection three quarters of the way into the chapter, or it could be the conclusion, or it could be, you know, the second paragraph or the 15th. But nonlinear word processors, let you open up a file easily quickly say, Hey, this is this case study. I write it out there and then shuffle or reshuffle it, depending on how your structure and organization end up being through various revision processes.
Okay, last bit a caveat. If you try one of these pieces of software, whether it's Scrivener or Evernote or Notion, any of these nonlinear word processors, and immediately you feel overwhelmed, discombobulated if it doesn't really click with your brain, it feel free to bounce on out of there.
There is no need to use a non-linear word processor. If it doesn't immediately strike you as something that would be really beneficial. But if you've been really struggling to keep track of various drafts, and want a little bit more flexibility and support and options to play in the earlier drafting stages. There's no better place to do it than a non-linear word processor.
Thanks so much for being here and I will see you next week.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!