After coming back from a wonderful conference, I feel refreshed. I heard a lot about the state of my field of research, the cutting edge ideas and the direction our research is taking. You can read more about it here.
Of course this aspect of science is important – the research outcomes, equipment and techniques we use are all critical pieces of information that make up the substance of oral and poster presentations. However, this year’s conference brought with it a stark realisation. I feel there is a large part of the conversation that is missing that is equally as important.
In fact, I think it is the true essence of how it is that we do what we do.
How do we, on a daily basis, manage a varied and conflicting schedule with experimental, administration and personal demands? What are the tools and techniques the help us balance these elements with efficiency and efficacy, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks?
I guess in a sense what I am talking about is a best practice discussion for the practicalities of doing research. Not a one size fits all approach, but at least a discussion of how the tools I use are beneficial and what I think I could use or need more of. While this may not fit a conference panel, here is my current toolbox.
Evernote: This one is definitely top of the list, one of the more recent additions but easily the most life changing. This is essentially my digital brain, the place where I collect, sort and store information. Everything from web clippings (using my handy integrated chrome extension), papers of interest, post ideas, project ideas, meeting notes to shopping lists – it all lives here. Completely synced across all my devices, and easily searchable. All of the major ‘life’ aspects have a notebook folder (e.g. manuscripts I’m coauthoring) with notebooks for each element (e.g. “Paper Name #327”), and individual notes for each idea or aspect of that element (e.g. introduction ideas, responding to reviewers comments etc). I think of this as a virtual brain dump – so that as long as I remember a particular piece of information is in evernote, I know it will always be there when I need it.
Google calendar/drive: My digital assistant. I use Calendar to manage meetings, equipment bookings and deadlines. In addition, the daily tasks feature keeps track of experiment steps or analysis projects. For me, this is one of the most crucial features, for a couple of reasons. First, tasks can be assigned to a specific day and live above that day in the calendar. This makes it easy to see what I need to do for the day, as well as what times I will have to play with. Second, I get to tick off completed tasks! I have found the most effective way to keep momentum is to break everything into small, manageable elements, so 8-10 specific tasks that give me a sense of accomplishment each time I tick off something. Finally (and most importantly) tasks are easily reassigned to other days using drag and drop. This means that it is so easy to be flexible, and doesn’t require tasks to be rewritten as with typical hand written to-do lists.
Drive at the moment is simply my backup storage place that provides some functionality when my hard drive is not plugged in. In some situtations it is really helpful to share documents and easily manage sharing permissions, although I dislike having to download and resync non-google files. I am still figuring out how best to incorporate this into my workflow.
Inkscape: Basically a freeware version of adobe Illustrator, I use Inkscape for all figure preparation. This includes figures destined for manuscripts, posters, or presentations. But also just as a neat way to collate image data from experiments. I am yet to come across something that I have wanted to do with a figure that Inkscape can’t handle. There is a relatively steep learning curve, but for a piece of free software it is remarkably versatile. One thing I will note is that it does not play well with iOS (admittedly this is not from personal experience, but from colleagues who have had a tough time getting started), however windows works well.
Atom & GitHub: As a self-taught python enthusiast, I am always looking for the best way to write, edit and run code to analyse my ever-growing data sets. This is my current configuration (although I have been through many others – Spyder, Jupyter, Sublime to name a few) and I am happy with the ease with which I can run scripts within atom, as well as manage my git commits with a few keyboard shortcuts. As someone relatively new to git version control, being able to see the folder layout and files which require an updated commit is incredibly helpful. Also, the ability to test, then tweak my code using attached iPython kernels within the editor is a great time saver.
Mendeley: Until very recently, I was an EndNote purist. I was first given access during my Undergraduate degree, and it did a wonderful job at managing my bibliography compared to the manual method. So I amassed a reference library, despite many issues leaving me disgruntled, and established a pipleline that included downloading the referencing file, downloading and saving the pdf separately, and then linking the two together using EndNote. To find articles, I would search in EndNote then locate the pdf and open it to view my notes and highlighted sections. If I lost you there – apologies – but it goes to illustrate my point: long and tedious. I have recently rediscovered Mendeley, and in terms of accessibility to my articles and notes, and ease of import, Mendeley beats EndNote hands down: click the Mendeley extension in my browser (or drag and drop to import a pdf), add notes/highlight and that’s it. All managed and searchable within a single program, again synced across all my devices. There are still a few kinks to work out (sometimes the imported reference information is a little clunky) but overall much more functional.
Trello: I have recently come across the idea of ‘story-boarding’ an article during the initial planning and write-up phases. Coming into a new lab, my writing style was at odds with my new boss and needed a little TLC – I am great at the technical reporting language but struggle to tell a narrative. The basic idea behind story-boarding is to layout the elements of a manuscript as discrete chunks and move them around like puzzle pieces to get the flow right. This also helps to identify holes – more experiments or more detailed analysis etc. I am using Trello as a way to trial this concept – each manuscript gets a ‘board’, the lists correspond to ‘Intro’, ‘Methods’, etc. and cards are tiny chunks – text prompts for the intro, individual figures or panels for the results. While this is the newest addition to my workflow, and firmly still in the trial phases, I am pleased with the outcomes so far. It has encouraged me to think about what papers I am working towards (helping to focus my research), as well as getting me thinking about the story to go with it.
So there you have it – my toolbox. It’s worthwhile noting that many of these I adopted from watching/hearing how someone else achieves a particular goal and making it work for me. I hope you find something new and useful, or maybe you have some ideas for something better? Feel free to let me know in the comments – I’d love to learn from you!
