Top tips for research and writing

Some thoughts. I may have more. They are not in any particular order because my organizational brain space is pre-occupied.

Change document background colour to a soft neutral - it’s a lot easier on the eyes and better for those with any kind of dyslexic tendencies. (In Word for Mac click on layout and it’s under page background.)

Use leechblock (firefox) or wastenotime (safari) apps to block specific sites for specific periods of time. If you don’t need the internet for research, deactivate the wireless until the next break (see below). And if you find these apps useful, show them some money love (likewise for time out below.)

Use a book holding device that is not the front of your laptop or your knees. One like this. Also, buy mini post-its. Ones like these that you can write on the ends of.

Use dejal time out app for macs to time short and long breaks. You can set it to remind you every 5-10 minutes to stop for 10 seconds, just to move your shoulders/eyes/ankles, and every hour (or whatever you want) to get up and make toast or walk round the block. Or make toast. It fades in and out gently and doesn’t let you do anything on the screen while you’re on break (checking Facebook is just as hard on your eyes and arms as working, after all).

Be uber-organized with note-taking from the start because it will pay off later. I take quotes from sources and put them in a Word document in a dedicated folder - one document per source, with author/year/title filename, even if there’s only one quote. Correctly formatted reference goes at the top of the document to be cut and pasted into references document if source is used. (Even though you want to get on, taking the time early to get the reference info will be of service to yourself later when you are having Deep Thoughts and don’t want to have to look up where Blinkin Publisher is located). Then when I finish researching and want to write (these two activities do overlap of course), I go to that folder with all the quotes documents. I glean all the quotes from my collection from a particular source to put in my chapters, and highlight the ones I’ve used in the source document and mark which chapter I’ve used them in. Then I rename that file with a Y (or whatever) at the beginning so I can easily see which documents in that folder I've already scanned for quotes and can see how far I’ve got through all my sources. Additional note: if a quote is about a particular key topic but doesn’t use the topic word, I’ll add it in after the quote as a ‘tag’ so I can do a search.

Use google play to find public domain (i.e. old) books for free and keep them together in one virtual place; use google books (just do a regular google search then click on the 'books' tab) and amazon ‘look inside’ (.com is usually the most likely to have that feature). Even if you have access to a paper copy of the book you can search for terms electronically on these sites. (Do NOT use sites offering illegal pdf versions of books. It cheats the authors and I will come round and beat you with cabbages.)

Befriend your advisor and/or other professor. Just because they're humans too. And also because they can usually get free interlibrary loans and books out of the library for longer than students can. How you choose to do this is entirely up to you.

Back up your files onto an external drive or cloud or your own email at least once daily. Keep that external drive separately from your laptop but nowhere it's likely to melt or freeze or get toothpaste on it.

Do the more intense brain work in the morning (got that tip from ‘Manage your day to day’, the purchase of which on Kindle was a good use of $4.)

Don’t spend all day you should be studying writing lists of studying tips for other people… (as she realizes she can’t post this right now because she blocked the site, which means she should be working…)