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How to implement GTD for university students

Hello all,

This weekend I took out seven HUGE trash bags out of my office after cleaning everything hidden in every corner. I had boxes that had never been unpacked from four moves ago that are GONE! What a liberating feeling!

I don't have my tickler file set up, but have my someday/maybe and my "next actions" set up. The entire office is set up like a GTD Central Command. I had been using the Hipster last semester before life took a weird turn.

Anyways.... the reason for my question is this...

I'm a doctoral student, and as such I have weekly assignments for classes, papers for the semester, and some independent projects that I"m working on like grant proposals, etc.

I keep wondering what the best way of keeping track of everything, and I can't come up with anything concrete, so I thought I'd consult with the experts on this board.

Thanks!

CharlotteLouise's picture

Lo-tech answer

File folders worked best for me on the diss. It seemed that the hole punching would invariably chop out something important. Plus, folders take up less room (I had three file cubes, which were also easy to move around). Binders make sense if the material is something you keep going back to, but with research, I tend to use the reference material intensively, then put it away, with limited later use. File folders are lighter to carry around, too.

As far as organizing, I just broke down by topic and color coded the folders. This was a very disorganized stage of my life, and coping with the dissertation was bad enough without worrying too much about process. All of the articles were listed in a Word file that eventually became the references--no key words or anything, just straight alpha. Any article I ran across that seemed in the least bit useful went into the list; articles I didn't actually have were marked *. I thought about EndNote or some other type of bibliographic program, but by the time I found out about those, I was so far along it didn't seem to be worth it (plus, I hated my topic and did not plan to do anything with it after finishing).

As far as organizing the articles themselves, it wasn't analytical or organized; more organic. For example:

[="Blue"]Cohesion = blue[/]

Folders for: Antecedents (lab); Antecedents (field); Results (lab); Results (field); Conceptual/Review. The logic here was that this was the order and arrangement of my lit review section.

[="Teal"]Group Learning = turquoise[/]

There were half a dozen or so folders there, mostly organized by general topic and / or setting, though all I can specifically remember is having a separate folder for Karl Weick's articles. I'm sure there was some reason, but it completely evades me now.

[="Red"]Psych research on groups = red[/]

General management stuff on teams = yellow For both of these topic, there were different folders; that's all I can remember.

[="DarkOrange"]Goal setting = orange[/]. This was just one folder, because all I was interested in was goal clarity, and I had a recent book that gave all of the general stuff on this topic.

[="Sienna"]Methods = plain manila[/]. Here, each folder was a topic: factor analysis; moderators/mediators, etc. These were actually a subset of a general file on methods, with such thrillers as MANOVA, Cluster Analysis and Survey Design.

For other project, I tend to organize by specific project -- but my research tends to jump from topic to topic. The one area where I have a lot of stuff is job analysis, and there's a similar scheme there -- one folder for conceptual, another with measurement issues, etc. Tried to get those all in purple folders.

It just always seemed to me that getting caught up in an elaborate organizing routine was a way of avoiding actually writing, so I really tried to not do that. :eek:

I'll try to think of anything else useful -- to be honest, I've tried to block the entire process out of my brian.

kristin

 
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