Ask HN: How to manage a PhD project?

[phdnewbieee]

Hi HN,

I’ve just embarked on my PhD journey in biomedicine and am starting to feel the pressure of managing multiple projects simultaneously. I’m currently using Quarto for drafting manuscripts and managing analyses with Git, which has been great so far. However, I’m finding it increasingly challenging to stay organized with the sheer number of tasks on my plate: manuscripts, conference posters, lectures, peer reviews, grant applications, emails, emails, emails, and more.

I’m considering self-hosted project management solutions and would love to hear about your experiences. Ideally, I’m looking for tools that offer features such as:

    - To-do lists
    - Time tracking
    - Storage for related text (emails, meeting notes) and files (manuscript versions, presentations, PDFs)

Do you have any recommendations or insights into (preferably opensource) software that has worked well for managing research projects or similar tasks?

Thanks in advance for your suggestions!

[1] https://quarto.org/docs/manuscripts/

[gsch1]

I’m starting my PhD journey as well, and currently working as a software developer at a financial institution :)

I prioritize the key aspects of my PhD for my University. In my case is publishing in high-level journals and conferences. My advice is pretty simple, don’t try to do everything; instead, excel at the most important tasks for you, your advisor and your university.

[dysoco → gsch1]

How do you manage to do a PhD plus work in the industry? Do you work a 9-5 job?

[gsch1 → dysoco]

Yes, I work as a 9-5 software developer for a financial institution. While I can’t fully immerse myself in my PhD like a full-time student, I make decisions with my advisor, focusing on the most important aspects for both my university and my curriculum. Setting clear goals with your advisor is crucial, it allows you to work with clear objectives in mind and gives you more freedom to manage your time effectively.

[KolenCh]

Some random suggestions:

- use Zotero to organize anything that can be referenced: papers obviously, but also any books with ISBN, even websites with snapshots (use the Zotero web extension) - learn about the CSL style and use Zotero to automatically export citations. Better BibLaTeX supports output to BibLaTeX. But if you can adapt your workflow to CSL YAML/JSON then it would be better. - use Notion with your academic email and then you can have free pro features. It has its own pros and cons, but you can upload anything there with virtually unlimited storage. (But obviously be careful to become over reliant on this.) - Keep logs of everything you do in a retrievable way, eg git. Take the lab notebook analogy but apply it to everything else, especially when code is involved. - try to make any code reproducible-ish. This is hard, but starts with manually logging things. You will want to be able to retrace your steps. - write a lot, write like you’re explaining to your future self (that may forget some of the details you know like the back of your hand right now). When you need to explain things to others, jot them down. When writing presentations for example, try write it like an outline of a mini paper (using speaker notes for things you don’t want to show on slide for example). The things you wrote could become handy when you later want to gather materials for a paper or dissertation. - because of this, when preparing presentation, with reasonable amount of time spent, try to generate images or equations that is publishing quality if you think it is going to be useful in the future. That kind of related to reproducibility. Going back to regenerate a graph differently is going to be hard. So better abuse the storage space and have a few extra formats than needed at the moment (matplotlib with pgf output for example.) - think about how you organize projects across different ecosystems with the same structure. The book Second Brain promotes using 4 categories Projects, Area, Resource, Archive and routinely tidying them up. It’s worth a read but it has its limitations.

Start writing your CV and drafting your dissertation in the beginning. The things you mentioned probably all fit into them and knowing how they fit into a CV/dissertation is a way of “managing” them.

P.S. using pandoc for all the writings is quite useful to me. Having a single source authoring presentation, LaTeX, documentation, etc. is quite useful. That allows me to copy and paste something I wrote for a presentation to my dissertation for example. YMMV however, as I’m a minority in that regard.

[philomath_mn]

No PhD here, but I'd suggest reading as much content (books, articles, podcast) from Cal Newport as possible.

He has a great set of processes and academia-specific advice, plus he has the career to back it up: he was able to crank out several books while getting MS/PhD in CS at MIT.

[brudgers]

Why are you making conference posters?

Good luck.

[phdnewbieee → brudgers]

My abstract was accepted as a poster only but that's life:) Thanks!