I’ve discovered, over the years, that my number one job as a research and writing coach is trying to get my students to start on time with their project. We had a class last week in which I gave my students ‘the speech’. ‘Start on time!’, I told them. ‘You have enough time to write the paper, but don’t let that time go to waste! Help out your future self, and start writing and researching now!’
I know from experience, of course, that not all of them will listen to me. In a few weeks from now, as we approach the final deadline, some of them will not be writing or researching but – you guessed it - procrastinating. 😀 (If this sounds familiar, and like most students you also regularly have trouble finding the drive to get started with that big scary paper, why not begin by reading my blog post on procrastination from a few years ago).
Regardless of what kind of student you are, though – an early starter or a procrastinator who only starts at the last possible moment - there will come a time when you need to start doing some actual work. And chances are that you will have far less time than you’d like. That’s a fact of life when you’re a student – at some point the clock starts ticking, and you’ll be under some kind of time pressure. Even if you started early, there will come a time when you discover that you have less time to finish the paper than you’d hoped for. If that sounds familiar, then this blog post is for you. Here, in no particular order, are the top tips I share with my students to help them stay organised and stay sane during the research process so that they can survive essay writing season and meet their deadlines - even if they started working on their project just a little bit too late.
1. Plan your week
In the final weeks of the semester, when things get busy but you still need to find time to work on your big final papers, you really ought to consider planning your time a bit more proactively. What I myself always do in such circumstances is to make a rough weekplan over the weekend. I strongly recommend that you do the same. During the weekend, look at the week ahead. Plan out your schedule, and then identify some gaps in your schedule where you can work in an undistracted manner for at least one or two hours on your bigger projects. For myself, I’ve found that I stay motived best if I make these chunks of time relatively short, and to plan them as early in the day as possible. It’s easier for me to stay motivated to actually make the most of these chunks of time if they’re short. If I tell myself I’m going to write all day, and I know the writing will be hard, guess what happens? It feels so painful in advance that I’ll put it off. But one or two hours early in the day, when I still have energy, and I can surf the caffeine wave of the first cup of coffee of the day? Works much better.
A good source to look at for more tips like this - how to plan your time better, and how to make sure you don’t get distracted when you actually sit down to write that important final paper - are the first two chapters of my own little book Make Lists Not Fists: A Student Survival Guide to Stress-free Productivity. You can download the first two chapters for free at bit.ly/listsnotfists.
2. Use Zotero for your references
Zotero is a free open-source app for Mac and Pc which is a real life-saver – it’s a database for all your references which you can also use to fully automatize your referencing in Word or Open Office. At the end of your project, it can then make a bibliography automatically for you, in the output style of your choice (APA, MLA, etc). At Masters or PhD level, you’d be a fool note to use something like Zotero – so why not start learning how to use it now, even if you’re only a Bachelor student? For a short video on how to install it and use it go here.
One of the most useful features of Zotero is its integration with Microsoft Word - for that to work, you'll need to install the Word plugin which comes with Mendeley. Instructions for how to do that are in the video. Make sure you use the stand-alone version of Word, not the browser version which Microsoft also provide you with. If the plugin doesn't work with your version of Word, then it will always work with the version of Open Office available as a free download here. The text editor which comes with this suite of Open Office programs is just as good as Microsoft Office, works beautifully with Zotero, and is free!
3. Use digital sources
Being efficient at using digital sources is one of the best ways to save time during research, I find. You can go from discovering an article or book to reading it in five minutes. Also, you can do keyword searches in digital sources – which is especially helpful if you’re dealing with brick-sized books. Yes, these usually have an index, but a keyword search often brings up passages that you wouldn’t have found through the index, and at a speed which is far higher. Of course none of this means you shouldn’t also go to the library – do check out what they have, it might just be that they have books relevant to your research project. But in the first instance, relying on digital sources can be a real life-saver.
For me, the number one benefit of using digital sources is annotation. Most digital sources are pdfs, and most pdf reading software like Adobe Acrobat allows you to annotate your pdf, which means you can highlight key passages that you think are most important. What most pdf reading software doesn’t allow you to do, however, is to then export your annotations as a text file. Trust me, this is a feature you really want! If the software you’re using has this feature, you can easily create a helpful overview of what you’ve highlighted with just a few clicks. From this file, you can then copy-paste key quotes straight into your paper, without needing to search through the entire pdf to find them.
Guess what? You can do this with Zotero, mentioned in the tip above. And for free! Once you discover this killer feature of Zotero, you’ll be shaking your head and wondering how you ever lived without it. It’s explained in the Zotero video mentioned above at roughly 4 minutes. This feature doesn’t just work for pdfs - Zotero will also allow you to highlight epub files. Really, really useful.
4. Organize your notes in a systematic way
While working on your paper you’re likely to do quite a bit of brainstorming, especially in the early stages. You’ll probably end up doing quite a bit of writing that doesn’t necessarily end up in the project itself, but which is still helpful to jot down, and which you might want to look at at again at a later stage. There are many different ways to do this, of course. You could do it all by hand in a research journal, or you could create a large collection of word documents. No matter how you write down your thoughts, however, you’ll also need some way of organising them so you don’t lose track of what is where.
For this, I myself use a note-taking app called Evernote. I have digital notebooks in it for all my writing projects, and within those notebooks I store all the notes relevant to that project. Sometimes I even have several notebooks for a single project: one with ideas for sources, one with brainstorm notes, and one with ideas for things I still need to fix, to give some examples. I used to just write down ideas in word documents, but I would always lose track of what was where and never actually reread what I wrote. If I put my notes in Evernote, however, I actually remember where they are, can easily find them again, and then work with them as the project progresses.
Evernote used to be free, and I always recommended it to my students. Over the years, however, it’s got quite expensive. You can still create a free account, but then you can only create one notebook, which is pretty useless. And the cheapest ‘paid for’ plan is over a 100 euros, which is for most students too expensive. I still use Evernote: it’s simple, reliable and ‘just works’ for me. But if money matters, you might want to look at competing products that do roughly the same for very little or even no money.
A very obvious choice is Onenote, made by Microsoft. All UCR students have a Microsoft 365 account which will allow to download all of Microsofts software packages for free. This means you can always download the latest version of Word or Excel, for free, at office.com. Here you can also download Onenote. It’s a simple, elegant app, and works quite well. It has the same basic structure as Evernote: you create digital notebooks, as many as you want, and then you can store notes relevant to that notebook inside each of them.
Another option to look at is Notion, an app which is highly similar to Evernote as well and that has got very popular in recent years. Unlike Evernote, however, it’s completely free: Notion will only charge you if you want to use it with an entire team, which for students isn’t a necessary option at all.
No matter which note-taking app you go for: make sure you can sync your notes across all your devices. It can be really helpful to have access to your notes on your tablet, or on your phone.
5. Use a to-do app at all times while researching or writing
I heavily rely on a digital todo app for almost everything in my life, not just research. I use Microsoft todo, which I strongly recommend. It’s free and extremely good. I have lists in this app for almost every area of my life: a list for each course I teach, a today list, a week list, a shopping list - you name it. Learning how to use a todo app properly is one of the best time management ‘hacks’ I can recommend. It took me many years to perfect my own system, and if you’re curious to see what it is, read the remaining chapters of my little book Make Lists Not Fists. I’ve shared chapters 1 and 2 with you already (which you can download for free), which deal with ‘offline’ tips for planning and making sure you work in a focussed manner. The remaining chapters explain how I use a todo app to organise my life. They describe a system that I’ve taught to many students, and although it’s not for everyone, I definitely have made a few ‘converts’ over the years. I still get the occasional email from alumni who write because they want to tell me that they’re still working with the system I’ve taught them.
Perhaps, though, you don’t want to have your whole life in a todo app. Everyone is different. You might already have a time management system that works for you, and that is fine. Even if that is the case, though, I still strongly recommend that you use a todo app for your research process. I’ve discovered over the years that it’s the perfect tool to make sure you stay on task, and to prevent yourself from getting distracted.
Research is difficult. No matter what you are doing, you’re constantly going to get little ideas for different things you could be looking into as well. While you’re writing, you might suddenly remember another source that is relevant and that you haven’t looked at yet. While reading a journal article, you’ll come across references to other sources that also look promising. And when searching databases like Jstor to hunt down a very specific source, you’re likely to stumble across other articles that also look promising.
That’s what I’ve discovered over the years: it can be very challenging to stay on task while doing research. No matter what you are doing, there are always countless other avenues you could be pursuing. It’s almost never a good idea, however, to abandon ship and start doing such tasks the moment the idea for them comes up. Quite frequently, such ideas for other things you could also be doing are forms of ‘covert procrastination’, for example. While you’re writing that difficult introduction to an important chapter, suddenly you remember that there is one article you haven’t looked at yet. It’s not super important, and you don’t really need to look at it now. But doing so is easier than writing, and before you know it, you’ve dropped everything and have switched to that other, easier task.
Not good.
It’s very important to develop some ‘staying on task’ muscle when writing a large, difficult project like a final paper. But it’s also important to remember all those little ideas that come up while you’re working. For this a todo app is perfect. For each writing project that I work on, I always create one or two lists in my todo app in which I am constantly dumping these little ideas as I work. I usually tidy it up a bit at the end of the day, by deleting some ideas, prioritising some others, and making sure there isn’t anything still something in the list that I really wanted to do on that particular day. This, I’ve found, is a very healthy habit. Stay on task, and dump ideas for other things you could look into in your todo app, then look at the list you’ve created at a later stage.
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