My Top Tools for Grad School

The apps, pens, stickies, and doohickeys that keep me organized.

Overview

It’s easy to fall behind in grad school with the huge amount of responsibilities ranging from reading literature, giving presentations, planning experiments, applying for funding, analyzing data, assistant teaching, and more; with a few organizational tools, I’ve found a few ways to enhance my productivity and take the stress out of planning while keeping diligent records of my work. Below are my tips and tricks, but I’d love to hear what productivity tools you use, too!

Notion

Notion is a free or paid productivity tool that can do pretty much anything you want. I use three Notion “pages:” Dashboard, 1:1 Notes, and Conference Timeline Tracker. I’ve seen other notion users with homework trackers, chore charts, social media content calendars, trip planners, and a whole lot more. You can customize fonts; add content blocks; embed images, links, and Widgets; add custom icons and banners to the top of your Notion pages; and integrate with other Google-owned apps like Slack, Trello, and Google Calendar. You can also tag almost any Notion entry with “properties” which can be links, text, dates, currency, and custom tags.

For everything but the Conference Timeline, I use templates, many of which are free on Notion’s website. My favorite and most-used page by far is my Dashboard, which organizes my tasks by priority level and category. I keep a few cute pictures and use pastel colors to bring some positive energy to my workday.

The very top of my Notion dashboard, mostly used for aesthetics.

Notion has a web app, desktop app, and mobile app, which means I can have access to my updated to-do list everywhere I go. Tasks are categorized under Research, Coursework, Teaching, Service, or Personal, and then further delineated by priority level: Major Projects, Quick Wins, Fill-ins, and Thankless Tasks. I rarely add tasks to my schedule that are Thankless Tasks, and I try to prioritize Quick Wins. Most of my total time is spent on Major Projects, which are usually my research aims. This is singlehandedly the most important tool I have used in my college career.

Each task gets added to one of these five categories, which then appear in my Today and Later This Week blocks depending on the date I assign them.

When I add a task, I can edit properties in this righthand menu like priority level, due date, and completion status.

Items that are populated in the Research, Coursework, Teaching, Service, and Personal tabs are automatically added to my Today and Later This Week blocks when their assigned date is coming up.

This semester, I’ve also taken advantage of a free Notion template for taking notes in 1:1 meetings. You could easily do this in any document software like Google Docs, OneNote, or Word, but since I always have Notion open, it’s convenient to keep my meeting notes there. This page has a button that automatically generates a meeting notes template with the person’s name, date, agenda, notes, and action items, which is faster for me than creating a new document for every meeting. The meeting notes are also collapsable to keep the page less cluttered.

My Conference Timeline is just a spreadsheet, which would be perfectly fine done in Excel, but (again) I always have Notion open so it’s convenient to keep everything in one place.

A simple spreadsheet that helps me keep track of conference dates, registration fees and deadlines, and abstract submissions.

Miro

Usually a collaborative tool, I use Miro to diagram and visually organize my experiment designs. Miro allows you to create flow diagrams, link images and files, add virtual sticky notes, add comments, and even create mockups for websites or apps. You can share boards with other people and give them edit access, but I use mine solo. I also have Miro embedded into my Notion dashboard, so I can see a quick snapshot of what I was last working on.

My only major qualm with Miro is it’s poor loading time, but the desktop app runs smoothly enough that I continue to use it. In the past, I’ve used other diagramming tools like Figma (or even just Powerpoint), but Miro seems to have the best integration of outside media like pictures and files to help me fully flesh out an idea.

A snapshot of my experiment flow in Miro. I categorize experiments into separate aims, and I can add other media like pictures of potential collaborators, links to academic papers, and leave questions for myself to come back to later.

LinkedIn

A no-brainer for most professionals these days. I started my LinkedIn in undergrad to document my work experience in a way that’s more long-term than a résumé. As a grad student, LinkedIn has been indispensable in building a global network of researchers and leaders in my field that help me as an early-career scientist. After a webinar, presentation, or casual coffee chat, I’ll send a LinkedIn connection request to a colleague with a friendly note identifying myself. It can feel intimidating at first, but once you start to populate your profile, you’ll realize just how much you’ve already accomplished!

A quick recommendation: especially as someone with a network of early twenty-somethings, a lot of posts tend to follow the same format. “I’m excited to announce…” with a company logo and a picture of someone in professional attire. While I love to read about people’s new jobs, initiatives, and accomplishments, I’d like to see more variety from my peers on LinkedIn. Brainstorm unique ways to start your posts, how you can best take advantage of adding pictures or links, and how you can leverage your network to serve you in the long-run.

Zotero

A citation manager is nonnegotiable as a researcher. Zotero is a free Google Chrome extension and desktop app that will import publications and automatically generate citations and bibliographies for you. You can easily sort papers by category, and they have a large variety of citation formats available. Zotero also stores the PDF version of publications, so you can open them in the app directly if you want a look at the full paper text. As soon as you press the Zotero extension in Chrome while you have a paper open, it automatically records information like author, journal, publication year, volume, issue, abstract text, and everything else you need to cite a source.

Zotero does also have cloud storage, though it’s pretty limited in the free version. I haven’t personally tried other citation managers like Mendeley or Endnote, but Zotero has been so simple I haven’t felt the need to go looking for another resource.

A snapshot of the Zotero interface. Publications are grouped into folders, usually by project. Each paper has its own entry with author, journal article, year, title, abstract text, etc. recorded in the right-hand panel.

OneNote

It might sound silly, but I’d never taken advantage of a dedicated notetaking software until I started grad school. I use OneNote to keep my digital library (peer-reviewed journal articles, protocols, class notes, and a scanned copy of my lab notebook) organized. When I read an academic paper, I prefer to take notes directly on the printed paper, but I need a way to document that I did, in fact, read it, and be able to reference my notes at a later date.

I’ve been taking notes on paper, using a flag or page marker sticky note to categorize the paper, and then uploading a scan to OneNote. Then, I electronically tag the OneNote entry with the same category as what’s on the post-it note and add the paper citation to the entry. My OneNote filing system matches my paper filing system at my desk, which means I can find both the paper and electronic version in just a few seconds.

Many of my classmates use OneNote or Goodnotes with their iPads and tablets; if I had one, I would write directly on the electronic copy of the paper and store my notes the same way. Documentation is a high priority in research; if I lost access to my physical lab notebook, class notes, or any of my protocols, I can easily access them electronically with this system and make sure I haven’t lost any important data.

The PARA Method

While not a physical tool, the Projects, Areas, References, and Archive (PARA) method is a useful organizational framework for things like file and inbox organization. Recommended to me by my friend

Max Florence

, I sort my Outlook inbox using the PARA method, which keeps my inbox emails to a minimum and (as a bonus) optimizes the loading time of the Outlook app.

Projects are initiatives that have a definite end date, like a class taken during the fall semester. Areas are similar, but are usually ongoing and don’t have an easily identifiable “end.” References are templates and important documents that you may return to frequently, and tasks are moved into the Archive when they’re finished. For example, I have my Fall 2024 classes listed under Projects, but I have club membership and responsibility tasks sorted under Areas. I only have a handful of emails saved in References like my degree requirements and some positive feedback that I like to look back on. I also use Outlook’s category feature to add another way to search for specific emails.

Before coming to Penn State, I hadn’t used any organizational method in my inbox, which made it really hard to search for emails once they were more than a few days old. I highly recommend using a simple folder system in Outlook or Gmail.

Writing Materials

Despite all of my electronic resources, I still find regular need for writing things down physically, and I love to collect stationery. For the last few years I’ve used the Poppin ballpoint pens, which smear a little but are overall pretty smooth. I use regular ol’ Post-it notes to write down quick tasks that are usually lower priority and aren’t included in my Notion dashboard.

I keep a blank bullet journal lying around in case I need to take physical meeting notes, which is usually the case if I don’t want my laptop to be between me and the person with whom I’m speaking. My favorite bullet journal brand to date is LEUCHTTERM1917.

ChatGPT

I didn’t use ChatGPT in undergrad because I associated it with cheating—many people still use it to cheat in academic settings—but now I’ve certainly come around to using it with some restrictions. I only use ChatGPT as a preliminary search tool, similar to how I would use wikipedia, but for more complex questions. I do a lot of ideating for my experiment designs, which ChatGPT can help me screen and point me to reading material for deeper learning. I don’t think it’s a great tool since it’s pretty easy to tell if something is ChatGPT writing, but there are probably ways to write efficient writing prompts to help it match your writing style. If you’re curious, I asked ChatGPT to write a short paragraph explaining my initial reluctance and my recent change of mind:

“Initially, I was reluctant to use ChatGPT, unsure of its value and wary of relying on AI for tasks like research. However, as I began exploring it for quick, preliminary searches, I found it surprisingly useful in jumpstarting my workflow. Now, I often use it to brainstorm ideas, clarify concepts, and gather initial insights before diving deeper into academic sources. It has become a helpful tool for ideation, saving time when I need to get a broad overview of unfamiliar topics. While I still rely on primary research for detailed analysis, ChatGPT complements my process by providing a solid starting point.”

Not that bad, but a little overly-formal in some places.

I use the free version because I doubt I could get much more out of the paid version, but I know some peers and professors that have a subscription. There are other AI models out there specifically tuned for academic research, but from what I’ve seen, most of them only have paid versions.

I’m 50/50 on my confidence in language learning models. They have a high carbon footprint since they’re trained on datasets with billions of datapoints, and they’re still not very accurate. I have little faith in its ability to convey any reproducible emotional qualities; if you ask it for opinions, it usually just tells you your idea is good as long as it’s marginally comprehensible. I am by no means a resident AI expert, but I’m hoping we’ll see significant improvements in AI’s writing capabilities in the near future.

Takeaways

Thankfully, there are a plethora of tools available now to grad students that can help streamline the grad school experience and enhance productivity; these are just a few of those tools that I’ve found success with over the years. I’d love to hear how other students and professionals have kept good organizational habits. Leave a comment below with your favorite tools, whether it be software, your favorite pen, or even habits for maintaining mindfulness!