I’ve always loved planning and organization, and grad school puts everything I know about organization to the test! There’s so much always happening: experiments to plan, experiments happening, data to analyze, papers to read, meetings and classes to attend, and then still trying to have time to present at conferences and network.
It’s a lot for me to keep up with! Below are some of the ways I try to keep on track and plan my life in grad school.
Use a planner
I swear by this one so much, I even use two planners, a physical one and a virtual one (todoist.com)!
Take notes of everything during experiments
Take notes about your experiments, including methods, results and any problems. I have both a physical and virtual notebook and am constantly updating them. It sounds like a lot, but it comes in so useful when trying to remember an experiment I did months ago and why it didn’t work. It also helps when planning to redo the same experiment a month later and you can’t remember how long it took or when you could take breaks, but if you have it all written in notes you can easily refer back to it when planning!
Have multiple to-do lists
I use ToDoist, a free virtual planner, that allows me to categorize my lists by topic so I can stay on track of the paper reading, experiments, classes and more. It makes it so you don’t feel as overwhelmed being able to have the lists separated!
Write down all your protocols
Do it. You may think you’ve done an experiment so much you will never forget it, but fast forward two years to having to repeat an experiment for a paper and you will thank your former self.
Sticky notes are your best friend
Don’t use them as an official resource (like don’t use it as your notebook) but they are great as reminders of time course experiments or upcoming meetings! These have saved me a few too many times in almost forgetting important meeting times.
Keep a centralized document of all the information from your current project
I find it so useful to have everything for one project in one place, and that way if you move into a different project but come back to an old one later, you can pick up right where you left off! I include the rationale for the project, important related papers, methods, results, and all the analyzed data.
- Title page with a description of the project and date it was last updated
- Table of contents (if you do this in Word you can set up the Table of contents to link to the sections of your document)
- List of key terms with definitions
- Methods. Write the methods as if you would put it in a paper, but with additional detail so you could come back to this in a couple years and be able to redo the experiment!
- Results with the appropriate figure referenced next to each conclusion. I also like to break the results up into smaller sections, as you would see in papers.
- Data! I normally label each chronologically Fig1, Fig2, and so on by when I add the data to the document. Also include the date you performed these experiments to get the results and where you can find the data.
- References (optional) with any papers you used for your methods or that were instrumental to you establishing this project.
