The time around New Year’s is the perfect moment for reviewing the past year to remind oneself of tasks, projects, results and achievements. Once the review has been written, it can be used, together with one’s personal ambitions, to formulate goals for the coming year. Continue reading…

This post is the third of three in a series on my systems for handling the increasing amounts of information, both outside and in my work. My routines for finding, collecting, reading and processing news articles, blog posts and social media links and scientific publications in my research and Ph.D. project were the topics of the two previous posts. Continue reading…

This post is the second in a series of three posts on systems I’ve implemented for coping with the increasing influx of information. The first post described my information system for everything not related to work, for example news articles, blog posts and social media links. In the present and an upcoming post, I describe similar information systems for work. Continue reading…

Every day I’m exposed to a lot of information, in the form of articles, blog posts, scientific papers and a lot more, and at times coping with all of it can seem daunting and never-ending.

Before, I would often interrupt what I was in the middle of doing, when I found an interesting read, or continue to do it and forget about the interesting read – both of which were frustrating.

Therefore, I set out to establish systems to tame the information overflow, in a way that, on the one hand, allows me to collect, read, process and archive the information, and on the other is as seamless and with as few disturbances as possible. Continue reading…

In 2012, I signed up for an Evernote account when I first heard of the service, but for a long period I didn’t use it a lot as I didn’t really get what all the Evernote fuss was about.

As detailed previously, I prefer to use Simplenote for my Ph.D. work log due to its simpler and more minimalistic interface compared to Evernote, but for all other types of notes, overviews and lists I have started using Evernote increasingly more. Especially, I have come to realize that Evernote is a great tool for structuring and archiving online media content of all kinds, and in this post I tell about how I use Evernote for this purpose. Continue reading…

For the first little more than a year of my Ph.D. project, I have been gathering a lot of background material, references, documents and notes, all of which is collected and stored digitally; this is structured with My Digital Workflow.

As everything is handled digitally, I don’t have stacks of papers and binders with different colors to organize my material, but instead have folders in my Dropbox, file naming conventions, notebooks and stacks in Evernote etc. to stay organized. These systems allow me to easily locate files and documents in Dropbox and notes in Evernote and therefore constitute an important part of organizing my digital material.

But folders and stacks don’t always provide the ideal overview and context. Continue reading…

As a student I did not spend a lot of time writing thoughts and ideas from my courses down, but instead assignments, reports and exams played the role of documenting my learning and understanding of the curricula.

When I started my Ph.D. a year ago, I realized that I would need to start writing down a lot more, and from day one I wrote minutes from meetings, notes from seminars, notes from student project supervision and notes about the progress in my work. Initially, this seemed slightly overkill since I could more or less manage most of it in my head, but as time passed more tasks showed up, and today I would feel limited without carefully writing my Ph.D. work log. In this post, I explain what tools I use for writing my work log and give some points that I find important in writing a (Ph.D.) work log. Continue reading…

About a year ago, I bought an iPad 3, and during the first period I mainly used it as a leisure gadget; Internet browsing, e-mail, social media etc. But when I started my Ph.D. project in the Fall, I decided to extend the use to my professional workflow, in particular to completely eliminate paper in my working routines.

In this post, I will describe how this digital workflow has been implemented to function seamlessly. I have picked up ideas and routines from many different sites and blog posts, and I hope my post will inspire you to start your own or extend an existing digital workflow. Continue reading…