PhD Productivity Porn — apps and hacks

When I started my PhD I was keen to find out what methods and apps current PhD students were using to record their progress and allocate their time. I was shocked by the lack of information out there. Since then I have invested time and money testing out different workflows and apps, and now spend less time thinking about working and am actually doing some!

In this and the next blog I’ll discuss the apps and habits that I have found effective.

A couple of caveats:

• Different strokes for different folks. I am working towards a paperless (zero-waste) minimalist lifestyle, but I know plenty of PhDs who prefer different approaches.
• Not all the approaches I have tested out are my own ideas. I am a regular listener of Hello Internet, Cortex and the Tim Ferriss Show and have tested out some of their workflows and habits they have discussed, as well as others from PhD Whisperer and Patter.
• Adapting from previous experience. I worked as a lab manager for the two years prior to my PhD so some of the product testing and workflows were already in place and have just been adapted.

Record keeping, planning and administration

Academia is no escape from the admin machine. In order to validate the amount of money and time the Government, Research Councils, and the University invest in you, they need regular records of what you are doing.

To save time writing these I wrote several google forms (listed below), which store the results in a spreadsheet for easy access, to record activities that would be needed for my annual reports. These were:

• Meetings
• Training activities
• Daily activities
• Research budgeting

For everything else admin related I trailed a number of apps/systems and evaluated their use:

Planing — notebook and pen, bullet journaling and apple notes

Calendars — outlook, google calendar, iCal, and Sunrise

To-Do list/Project management— InShort, Omnifocus, and Wunderlist

Note taking — Evernote, apple notes, notebook and pen

What stuck:

• Meeting record- I have found this to be the most useful google form-sheet combination. It allows me to keep track of tasks that I, my supervisors and collaborators are responsible for, which keeps as us accountable. I colour code progress of each task and use this each fortnight to plan out my time.
• Training record- I nearly always write notes (in apple notes or on paper) during training exercises, I transfer these to the form afterwards. That way it’s all backed up in the cloud, in case I lose my notebook.
• Grant budget- I asked my administrator for a copy of my grant spreadsheet when I started and I keep this up to date with a form. I have graphs automatically generated so that I can get an overview of the account in a glance.
• Paper notebooks- I have a day on each page and set goals every fortnight. Originally I was setting goals once a month but I found two weeks to be a more manageable time frame. I review the progress at the end of the fortnight alongside my meeting record and use both to plan the next two weeks of science (see title image).
• Google calendar — I was happily using Sunrise, until it became unsupported, for viewing all my calendars (outlook, google, personal iCal) and logging in important dates. I now use google calendar instead.
• Wunderlist— I can organise my lists and items to a level of detail that is effective for me for.
• Apple Notes — I have different folders for each research project and use individual notes as brain dumps of particular topics that I keep coming back to or for ideas. I like how you can almost any multimedia to the note. I find this especially useful when I am scanning coral cores and I need a visual reference to remember the order of specimens in a straw (see image below).

• Notebook and pen — work best for in-person meetings as I think that writing on a laptop or on a phone can give the wrong impression. It’s also unparalleled when you need to explain something with diagrams (left).

What didn’t:

• Daily record using google forms and sheets- despite trying to become paperless I find I do my best planning on paper. I found that I was either duplicating my efforts in my paper notebook or just ignoring this tool altogether. I also tried out the daily rituals and 5-minute journaling (via Tim Ferriss) and found them both too time consuming.
• I trialled bullet journalling and other list making styles and to be honest its all just aesthetics and most definitely productivity porn- ineffective but fun.
• Apple notes for planning — I find that I reach more for paper and pen than for apple notes in this respect but find apple notes more useful for other types of note taking.
• Omnifocus — All CGPGrey’s ranting about how great this app is did sway me to give it a go. I stuck it out for the trial period and found it over engineered. The learning curve was steep and it took far too long to set everything up. Once set up, it became obvious that I didn’t need to have such a detailed workflow.
• InShort — I had previously used this during the microscope slide scanning project I was part of last year but found that uses for it in the PhD have been minimal. The lack of documentation and support from the developer of this app is minimal.
• Apple Reminders — is ok, but not as functional as Wunderlist my uses.
• Evernote — was buggy and slow, and I didn’t need the extra features that apple notes was missing.

Literature review and critique

What I have tried:

• Google form and sheet combo, paper notes, Mendeley,

What stuck:

• I found the google form sheet combo most effective in this instance. I can standardise the entry into the literature review matrix (see this post about matrices by Patter), which aids identification of themes and important parameters e.g. growth rates, micro-CT methods and uses.
• Mendeley — I used this when I was an undergrad so its something I am familiar with. The mark-up tools are useful and I can easily tag papers for multiple uses. My only issue is the current lack of connectivity with google docs.

What didn’t:

• Paper notes — I used to find it difficult to read papers on a screen, and for most of my undergrad I printed them out- this was extremely wasteful in terms of both paper and time. I installed Flux so that the tone of the screen could be altered. This reduced the strain on my eyes and reduced my exposure to blue light in the evenings- Win!

Report writing

Writing is a huge part of being a PhD, whether it’s conference abstracts, grant applications, annual reporting or paper writing, supervisors and collaborators need to be able to review, contribute and edit alongside me.

What I have tried:

• Report writing — google docs, papers, word, scrivener, google sheets, excel, numbers, LaTeX

What stuck:

• Docs — allows live chat about the work, multiple editors to attack a single doc at the same time, no need to keep track of and combine multiple versions. Easily exportable to Word for final formatting.
• Sheets — not as powerful as excel but you can rearrange and sort the data more intuitively. I use it for tracking the specimens I have on loan from the collection and my scanning records. I then use Excel/R for statistics. I try to avoid Microsoft products as they don’t run well on Mac OS and I have lost weeks worth of data analysis before.
• LaTeX — I used this a couple of times to write applications and the results were great! So far I haven’t found a use for it. I am on a LaTeX course at the moment so hopefully I’ll be using this flexible writing tool a lot more in future.

What didn’t:

• Papers and numbers — they are ok, and I have used them in the past for personal things but the interactive abilities of the google platform suit my purposes better.
• Scrivener — this was created for script writing but I thought it would make a good tool for drafting papers. I had a free trial used it once and then returned to using google docs.

Data storage

As the primary methodology of my PhD involves micro-CT I am generating a lot of data (typically 30Gb of data per coral). So far I have scanned 50 corals so that’s over a terabyte of data in just over 6 months. It is, therefore, essential to backup the raw and working files for each coral so that if the lab gets flooded (which happens more frequently than you would imagine) or I drop my hard drive all is not lost.

What I have tried:

• Cloud storage — Drive, iCloud, dropbox and Box

What stuck:

• Drive was my go to for backing up all my working docs and sheets. I can share all my work with supervisors easily. My only problems are 1) that the list of folder contents in the side panel are usually wrong or too vague to be useful, and 2) the last modified dates are not reliable.
• Box — is another cloud storage app and is a cross between drive and dropbox. It has a desktop syncing function that is useful as the upload speeds are fairly slow and you can let this run overnight. I use it for storing the raw data and backing up my hard drives (with current working datasets). Document editing is not as good as it is in google docs but better than it is in Dropbox. Another bonus is it that it is free for me whilst I am at the museum.

What didn’t:

• Dropbox — I started using dropbox in my final undergrad year alongside google drive and I quickly left it behind because of the problems with versioning. I few of my collaborators use it and we always get mixed up with what version of our document is current.
• iCloud — is good for personal data (photos, video etc.) but not needed for the PhD since I already have a google drive subscription and the NHM has Box.

Lastly, I use 1password to store all my passwords and sensitive information that I need to access frequently, e.g. grant codes, and Cloak to secure my internet connection on my phone and my laptop. I have been using both of these for a couple of years now and have had no problems or reason to try out a different provider.