I used Mendeley for a long time but it’s owned by Elsevier, and I object to the closed accessibility (you can’t transfer your highlights and notes to other apps). There is currently no perfect solution to paper management. Some of the tools are very unintuitive (e.g., table formatting). No table of contents for individual notes. It’s not 100% perfect, but it ticks more of my boxes than the alternatives. What if it disappears six months from now? It hasn’t complete replaced Evernote or Google Docs in my workflow, but for the limited scope of project notes, I’m enjoying it so far. I recommend maintaining these kinds of “lab books” both for presentation and self-organization.Ĭoda is a newer app, so I’m a bit hesitant to fully rely on it. I keep running notes for each project (kanban board to track progress, ongoing writeups of data, figures, hypotheses, and research directions), and these are especially useful for meetings with my advisor and teammates. I recently started using Coda as a replacement for Quip, Google Docs, or Evernote for maintaining project notes. Hides what I don’t need to think about right now, while allowing me to file all my to do items so that they stop taking up mental space. I love Things so much that I have seriously considered getting an iPhone just so that I can access the mobile app. The only to do items I don’t track in Things are specific coding tasks for projects these fit better into kanban boards, which I use Coda to maintain (see below). When my mental load starts feeling heavy, I know that I can safely offload everything into Things and not have to worry about forgetting anything later. I use it for the vast majority of my to do items, both personal and professional.

Things is a gorgeous task tracker for OSX. Below are my current, personal favorite tools for keeping track of my research and academic work! I enjoy trying out new applications to optimize my workflow and reading about what other people use.

Life as a grad student is busy (teaching, meetings, mentoring, research, internships, etc.), and I rely heavily on organizational tools to help me survive. If you’re like me, New Year’s comes with an impulse to re-organize everything.

Evernote kanban view