The productivity app workflow I use to write my master thesis

If you don’t have enough time to read the whole article, scroll down to the end of the article where you can find a summary of the workflow. Enjoy!

Its been more than two years now, since I proudly handed in my bachelor thesis at my old university. I remember it like it was yesterday: The feeling of accomplishment and relieve after long weeks of research and struggle. Back then, I have been a huge fan of productivity apps already, but – wow – little did I know about workflows. My precious item for the bachelor thesis was a spiral bound collection of relevant articles, that I printed out and carried around the campus, so that I always had them with me, because I never knew when an inspiration would hit me. Good idea, you might say, but highly inefficient.

…but – wow – little did I know about workflows.

Right now I find myself in a similar situation: My master thesis is coming up and this time I want to do it right. Here are the three productivity apps that I use for my workflow to prepare and structure my topic, manage my literature and collect my thoughts:

1. Evernote

Evernote is my inbox for everything that could be of importance lateron.

I actually started to use Evernote just recently, but already became a big fan, because I can simply store any thought or piece of information, no matter how tiny or unimportant it seems to be at first, inside my notebooks and will perfectly be able to find it afterwards (with searching and tagging). Right now, I’m still busy trying to narrow down my focus on the topic, but I already have to think about how I want to design my questionnaire so that I can properly conduct the planned experiment. Thus, whenever I come across an important piece of information I can just save it to Evernote. The best input always comes from randomly talking to my fellow students about my topic. If someone says „Have you considered this and that?“, I will just pick out my phone and write down the thought, so that I won’t forget it. So Evernote is my inbox for everything that could be of importance lateron. I’m not really taking extra care of a neat structure, because in most cases, time matters and I will review the notes anyway to see what I actually need for writing. This is what I put into my Evernote notebook:

• An ongoing reading list with checkmarks
• Screenshots from the AppStore (My thesis deals with mechanisms of it) with small annotations and descriptions
• All sorts of typed notes, mostly ideas I want to remember
• Quotes, links and articles from web

I frequently review all the information inside Evernote to decide what needs a closer look.

2. GoodNotes

GoodNotes contains all the really important documents

Of course I use GoodNotes, because it has always been my go to app for notetaking and collecting PDF files to annotate and study them. I have created a sub-category in my ”University“ folder that I called “Master Thesis“.

This folder contains lots of different PDF files, mostly scientific papers that I download from GoogleScholar or other research data banks. Sometimes you have to go old school and visit the library to get some literature. I usually turn to ScannerPro or use our Bookscanner to scan the relevant pages.

There are two more notebooks inside the category. Since I sort the notebooks by name I used the prefixes „1- & 2-“, so that they always stay on top. If you want to know more about this, check out my article on how to organize your notebooks in GoodNotes.

The first one is for my ongoing notetaking, like meetings with my supervising professor or documentation of structured interviews that I conduct. The second one contains a summary of the literature that I need to study for my thesis. If the papers are already in GoodNotes, the tab-function comes in very handy, because I can simply switch back and forth between the annotated and highlighted PDF file and my summary notebook. Should they be in Evernote, I make use of the multitasking function of my iPad Pro, and have GoodNotes open on one side, and Evernote on the other side, to transfer the relevant information to my notebook.

Multitasking on iPad Pro to summarise my thoughts

Tips & Tricks: Saving articles from web to GoodNotes

GoodNotes currently has no own webclipper, so I needed to come up with a workaround, to save relevant articles from web to GoodNotes as PDF. This is necessary, when I already decided that the article will be relevant and I need to quote it during my writing. Otherwise, I simply send it to Evernote for further review. But how do I do it? Easy, I use the awesome Make PDF workflow with the workflow.is app.

Searchable wikipedia article inside GoodNotes

This way I can easily highlight and annotate any web article in GoodNotes and even search for keywords in it 🤓.

So, GoodNotes contains all the really important documents:

• Highlighted and annotated scientific papers
• Book chapters, I need to study and quote
• Input of my professor
• Summary of all the literature
• Questionnaire designs, etc.

3. Everclip

This app only is a small part of my workflow but not less relevant than the others, because it is pretty much the top of the funnel of my research progress. Usually I open a bunch of tabs in Safari and then read through them one by one to see if they are relevant. Doing this in your browser is note really convenient, because it quickly becomes confusing. Thats why I open all the tabs instead and then use the share extenstion of Everclip to send all the content to Evernote. And thus, the circle begins again.

Summary

I hope I was able to give you an introduction on what you can do with the different apps that I mentioned and how you can use them to create pretty powerful workflows. Of course this one does not only apply to writing a thesis, so I’m curious what other experiences you made. As promised, here is the summary of the workflow:

1. Usually, I browse the web or books and magazines for all sorts of content. If anything catches my attention, I use Everclip to quickly save it to Evernote.
2. If a thought comes to my mind, I use Evernote as an extension of my brain, so that I don’t need to worry about forgetting anything important. I just write it down, or take a screenshot and drop it into my notebook. Evernote is in the middle of the funnel and works like an inbox. I constantly review it and decide which things are relevant for the thesis.
3. Scientific papers, book chapters or articles that I need to study and highlight, are imported into GoodNotes. I can easily annotate them and summarise them in a blank notebook, so that all important information is in one place when I want to start writing my thesis. Web articles or websites that I consider to be important right from the start can easily be saved as a PDF document and imported straight to my GoodNotes library with this workflow.