Finish YourThesis Program

grads™

dora Farkas

The Latest Online Technology Tools To Help

You Boost Your Productivity and Stay Organized

bonus module 3

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Some students find it difficult to stay organized when they are bombarded with information through email, social media, and their work environments. Fortunately, the evolution of digital communication was also accompanied by the development of online tools to help you stay organized, manage your work and collaborate with others.

In this bonus module, I will share with you FREE (or low cost) online tools to help you become more productive and do high quality research. These services will help you to:

9 Backup your work

9 Manage your time better

9 Complete projects on time

9 Collaborate and share file with others

9 Stay on top of latest developments in your field of research

9 Bookmark/organize information from journal articles and website

9 Add references easily to your papers To find out more about each service, click on their names and you will be redirected to their website.

My motto has always been “you can never backup your work enough times.” I have nearly lost irreplaceable data due to unexpectedly corrupted files. Fortunately, while I was in grad school, our university had a file backup service that was updated daily, so I had access to everything I had done in the previous 8 weeks.

Once I left the university, however, I had to find my own off-site file backup system. Large-scale backup services charge a monthly fee, but the cost is negligible compared to the damage of losing all your work. Here are some of the most popular off-site backup services:

Backblaze: A very simple system with automatic backups, which provides

Backup ServicesParT 1

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unlimited storage for $5/month/computer. The cost per month goes down slightly if you sign up for 2 years in advance.

Crashplan: Crashplan is one of the most popular backup services. It has a free plan, and its paid plans ($5-12.50/month) include advanced features such as continuous minute-by-minute backups to their cloud system, so you can access your data from any web-browser. Similar to Backblaze, you can save on the monthly costs significantly if you prepay for one or more years.

Carbonite: Carbonite is a popular backup service because it offers advanced features, such as mirror image backup (local backup of hard drive, including operating system), and courier recovery service (hard copy of backup if disaster strikes). Pricing ranges from $60-$150/year depending on the features.

Need to put more structure into your day, find time to get more work done, or are you trying to balance personal and work commitments? Today’s online scheduling tools have a variety of features that not only help you to keep track of your appointments and meetings, but you can also organize your to-do list in a logical manner. Most of them have mobile apps, so you can schedule and reschedule events anytime and anywhere.

Google Calendar: This is probably the most popular online calendar out there, and it has apps for both android and iphones. Google Calendar integrates well with other online scheduling platforms so you can add appointments to your calendar with a click of the button. You can also schedule repeating events, add attachments, enable gentle reminders, and add unique icons to differentiate special events.

Coolendar: A new type of scheduling system, that links up with your existing calendar, including Google Calendar, iCal or Microsoft Outlook. Coolendar enables you to use hashtags to group similar items together, it integrates well with the

Organize Your TimeParT 2

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most popular web-based systems, and it can also sync with multiple calendars. These features make it possible to stay on top of your personal life and your work-related commitments on a single platform.

Calendy: If you need to schedule a lot of meetings, but are tired of playing phone or email tag, Calendy offers a simple platform to make scheduling easier. They have a free option if you only have one type of event, and their paid service, which includes their full list of features is $10/month.

Whether you want to or not, you probably have a to-do list. The problem is that most people’s to-do lists are sitting in on sticky-notes or little notepads that get lost easily — or perhaps they never get a second look. Online tools will make it super-easy to keep all your to-do’s in one place, organize them, and manage collaborations.

Wunderlist: In addition to helping you capture and organize all your to-do’s, Wunderlist also allows you to share your lists with your colleagues and friends. You can add comments and start discussions, which makes it simple to collaborate with others on projects both at home and at work.

Trello: Trello is a task and project management system that is a great organizational tool if you have to stay on top of multiple projects. It helps you to quickly assess the status of the projects and track progress of all team members. You can also create and assign tasks to co-workers and yourself to keep projects moving.

iDone This: A simple team performance management platform that allows you to view everyone’s progress on a certain project. It is a shared work-diary, which makes it easy for all team members to view progress. This can be especially handy when you are collaborating with researchers at different

Organize Your To-Do List and

Collaborate on ProjectsParT 3

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locations, and you have limited in-person or over-the phone interactions.

Are you looking for a simple interface to share files or work on them with a collaborator? Here are some of the most popular interfaces for sharing and collaborating on documents, spreadsheets, presentations and videos:

Google Docs (now known as Google drive): This is probably the simplest interface for collaborating on documents. You can upload documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, then edit them from any computer. You can then share a link with a collaborator, and give them the option to either edit or to comment on your document.

Dropbox: A free service that enables you to upload larger amounts of data to share with others. If you have several documents that are too large for an email, you can upload them to Dropbox and share the link with as many people as you would like. Dropbox also has a paid plan if you want to share large files such as videos.

Hackpad: Recently acquired by Dropbox, this cloud-based service provides private workspaces to allow you to share files, collaborate with others, and access your workspace from anywhere through your mobile device, desktop or tablet ($2/month per user).

In order to do high-quality research, you need to be aware of all the cutting-edge news in your field. But who has time to browse all of the websites on a daily basis? Enter RSS readers, which help you collate relevant content from your favorite sources into one place so you can get the latest news without having to visit multiple sites.

Feedly: Feedly is one of the most popular RSS reading applications for various

File SharingParT 4

RSS Readers for ResearchParT 5

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web browsers and mobile devices (both iOS and Android), and it is also available as a cloud-based service. Feedly compiles news feeds from a variety of online sources, and it is easy to customize and share the content with others.

InoReader: This is an easy to use application that offers several different views to tailor your reading experience. InoReader’s additional features include keyboard shortcuts to let you change views, subscribe to feeds and modify your preferences, as well as a side panel that also shows when new items are available in any of your feeds.

AOL Reader: A very simple user interface, which allows you to quickly add new websites, search websites by category, and a SmartFeed that automatically scans thousands of sites for your specific topic. AOL also makes it simple to transfer your subscriptions from other RSS readers, and it has an App for iOS and Android devices.

Given all the information that one needs to organize (especially for literature reviews), it can be difficult to remember where you found each piece of data that you will include in your manuscripts. Long-gone are the days with index cards and yellow highlighters. With these free (or low cost) online tools, you can easily keep track of information from around the web.

Delicious: Delicious (formerly known as Del.icio.us) is one of the most popular social bookmarking sites. It is a free and easy tool to save, organize, and discover interesting links on the web. Delicious recently upgraded and streamlined its interface to make it more user-friendly, and it also has apps for iOS and Android to make it easy to share content with the community. One of the nice features of Delicious is that it pulls up a quick preview of the link to make it easier to select and sort links you may have saved.

Save, Organize, and

Bookmark InformationParT 6

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Diigo: If you are experiencing information overload, Diigo is a free, powerful cloud-based knowledge management tool, which integrates well with all major web-browsers and mobile devices. You can highlight information digitally, organize them in your cloud-based library and share it with as many people as you want. You can also provide feedback through the cloud, making communication with collaborators more efficient.

Mendeley: Mendeley is a free reference manager and academic social network, which makes it possible to create your own fully-searchable library, cite as you write, and read and annotate your PDFs on any device. This platform makes is easy to securely store your information and access it from different devices. You can also sort references, documents, and notes, and highlight or annotate your ideas within the document.

Evernote: Evernote is one of the most popular web-based note-taking systems. It has a free version, as well as $5 or $10/subscription plans for advanced applications. Evernote has a variety of features that make it easy to organize your lists, manuscripts and ideas. You can also convert your writing into slides for a presentation as your work evolves. The paid plans include enhanced search features and also collaboration with coworkers.

Pocket: Pocket allows you to save information from multiple websites into one simple platform that can be accessed from any mobile device. Pocket’s premium version ($4.99/month) includes a permanent library for your information, personal backup, organizational tools, and advanced search tools.

As you can see there is a plethora of free or low-cost online tools that help you to become more organized, manage projects, collaborate with others, stay at the cutting edge of your research, and meet your deadlines. The list of online tools and their features is growing daily, and it can be overwhelming to incorporate all of them into your daily workflow at once.

In my experience, the highest priority is to make sure that your work is backed up (1). Most universities have automated backup services, and you can also

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subscribe to one of the off-site services to backup your devices at home.

The second highest priority is to organize your time (2), to ensure that you stay on top of all your commitments, both at work and at home. Once you have your time organized, you can move into capturing your to-do list (3), and then managing projects and collaborating with others (3-4).

Finally, to stay on top of the research in your field, subscribe to RSS feeds (5) and organize your references to incorporate into your thesis and publications with ease (6).

Disclaimer: The lists of productivity tools in this bonus module are meant

to be suggestions to enhance your workflow. www.FinishYourThesis.com

and the author are not affiliated with any of the services, and are not

responsible for any losses or damages due to the use of these tools.

9Copyright © Dora Farkas, www.FinishYourThesis.com

To receive maximal support from this program,

please send your questions or comments about

this Module to program@finishyourthesis.com.

I will announce the return deadline for each

Module via email. This will help me to address

your questions during the webinars.

Remember that other students might be facing

situations as you, and they will also benefit from

the strategies that I will offer during the webinars

in response to your questions.

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