Hi all,
So, it is that time of year when I decide things have become too chaotic and it is time to make a concerted effort to "get my work life organized" in the next year. Can't say its actually worked at any point, but I like to make the effort. Feeling it particularly acutely this year with a recent move, a growing lab, some larger funding coming in for new/complex projects and a new baby at home. Usually end up trying 30 things and maybe 1 or 2 stick, but thought it might be interesting to open up for discussion and perhaps generate some new strategies or tools I haven't tried yet. I'm trying to keep this more focused on the academic/research world as we've had some recent threads on practice management and the like. Plus at least in my experience the clinical tools are just much more well-established (e.g. EHR, billing/accounting tools) relative to the million-and-one research things we need to cobble together. Beyond that, anything is fair game for discussion - references tools, ways of managing to-do lists, tricks for keeping up on the literature, supply inventory procedures, budget management, general approach to communicating with students/staff, etc. Be as nuanced as you like - heck I'm even curious how people organize file structures for projects. I'll get it started with some things I'm doing, but given the abstract/open-ended nature of this I'm sure I'll figure out more down the road. Students - feel free to chime in as well. You probably won't have as much experience tracking grant budgets, but things like reference management you absolutely might know of tools I don't.
Reference Management: Tried multiple different software solutions, but keep coming back to Endnote. It just seems to have the best integration with Word and the easiest system for switching reference styles since the journals I submit to often have wildly different styles. My main frustration is that the online search function sucks badly and I have been entirely unable to figure out why. Articles I "know" exist in Pubmed are not found so I end up having to export from google scholar or similar. Also the option to import full text through my library is really hit or miss. I still keep entirely separate Endnote databases for each grant/paper. Feel like it gets too overwhelming otherwise.
Reference Searching: Almost exclusively google scholar for quick off-the-cuff solutions as it seems to cast a wider net - some psychology journals are not in pubmed, some biomed/neuroscience journals are not in PsycInfo, etc. I used to be much more thorough and systematic as a student but now that I know my area pretty well I've become a lot more haphazard. A fair bit of the time, I know the likely authors or a specific article already. For genuinely new topics, I usually look for a few good review papers and branch out from there. Obviously this differs when I'm doing true systematic reviews, but I've trended towards shorter intro/discussion sections in recent years so exhaustive searches have been less necessary.
General keeping up on the literature: Really interested what others do as this is one of my biggest struggles. In part because of the sheer range of the literature I try to keep tabs on. My primary research area is addiction but within that it runs the gambit from basic to public health. I try to cut myself off at the super-basic stuff ('omics) or the super-applied stuff (e.g. policy/prevention programs). However, I'm often adopting methods and analyses from other content areas or even completely different fields of study which leads to me wanting to at least loosely keep tabs on those. Subscribe to scientific american and regularly scan nature news and science daily. I have myncbi searches set to run on a different topic M-F (e.g. addiction treatment on Monday, fmri on Tuesday, pre-clinical behavioral pharmacology on Wednesday, etc.). My newest endeavor is trying to get an RSS feed set up to pull in the tables of contents from ~60-70 journals I regularly cite and curate them. Haven't found a way to do this yet that I feel like works very well. Trying to get a combination of feedly and zapier that does it, curious if others have had success.
Inventory/supply tracking and management: Pretty basic. Have an excel spreadsheet with a list of all our consumables. Dedicated staff member reviews things every other Friday and alerts me when things get low so I can have our admin team order. Nothing counted per se, just eyeballing stuff.
Grant Budgeting/Management: This is another sore spot. Our grants management office is chronically behind and seems to have an extremely poor understanding of how the research process actually works. So projections always end up super-weird (i.e. if we have a month where recruitment lulls, projections then end up excluding important costs). I'm trying to shift towards doing this myself in excel but its a little complicated as I don't love the idea of staff seeing each other's salary (easy enough to find online, but somehow feels wrong to have them explicitly accessing spreadsheets where its listed). Still building this out, but I'm hoping to configure an excel file for each project where staff can track research spending (e.g. supplies, participant payments, scanning costs, etc.) that feeds into an excel sheet only I can access with staff salaries so I can monitor/project myself.
Communication: Probably not a good idea, but my email is basically up 100% of the time just because my team has a lot of things they like to communicate on the fly. Considered setting up a slack channel. Team is small enough presently I haven't seen the need yet. I also feel like this is tricky with regards to HIPAA. While easy to keep names and obvious identifiers out, easy to slip in "Participant 102 rescheduled for Tuesday" which - as stupid as it is - is technically identifying information from a compliance perspective.
Cross-Institute Document Sharing: This is another thing I haven't found a great solution for. I like dropbox, but more and more people are using google doc/drive, at least for manuscripts/grants. Generally fine, but I find its interface with endnote kinda clumsy. For grants, I just find it a little tougher to track who has done what in this system when we're talking about 20+ different sections. I still prefer emailing people documents they then return a renamed file with changes tracked.
Scheduling: Straight up outlook calendar for me and my staff. IT strongly discourages us syncing calendars outside their system, but its super-inconvenient because any time I schedule something I'm now checking multiple calendars.
To-Do List/Project Management: Love Asana. Tried trello, but can't get into kanban style. I keep a general to-do list for myself here, as well as project-specific to-do lists accessible by project staff. Have templates built for grants (e.g. lists of all sections for NIH and major foundation grants). Individual studies I largely leave to the relevant staff how they use, but I encourage folks to set up progress flow for participants. Its primarily utility is typically at study startup and closeout when there are a bajillion little things that need to be done (e.g. training, source form creation, data QA, prep for archiving, IRB, CT.gov, open-whatever closeouts, CONSORT diagrams generated, analysis potentially spread across multiple individuals, etc.).
Grant Opportunities: Very haphazard at the moment as I mostly target NIH. The little local grants I just rely on hearing about by email. Very curious how others follow these.
I'll probably think of others. Curious what you do - either for any of the above or anything else even peripherally relevant to managing academic life.
So, it is that time of year when I decide things have become too chaotic and it is time to make a concerted effort to "get my work life organized" in the next year. Can't say its actually worked at any point, but I like to make the effort. Feeling it particularly acutely this year with a recent move, a growing lab, some larger funding coming in for new/complex projects and a new baby at home. Usually end up trying 30 things and maybe 1 or 2 stick, but thought it might be interesting to open up for discussion and perhaps generate some new strategies or tools I haven't tried yet. I'm trying to keep this more focused on the academic/research world as we've had some recent threads on practice management and the like. Plus at least in my experience the clinical tools are just much more well-established (e.g. EHR, billing/accounting tools) relative to the million-and-one research things we need to cobble together. Beyond that, anything is fair game for discussion - references tools, ways of managing to-do lists, tricks for keeping up on the literature, supply inventory procedures, budget management, general approach to communicating with students/staff, etc. Be as nuanced as you like - heck I'm even curious how people organize file structures for projects. I'll get it started with some things I'm doing, but given the abstract/open-ended nature of this I'm sure I'll figure out more down the road. Students - feel free to chime in as well. You probably won't have as much experience tracking grant budgets, but things like reference management you absolutely might know of tools I don't.
Reference Management: Tried multiple different software solutions, but keep coming back to Endnote. It just seems to have the best integration with Word and the easiest system for switching reference styles since the journals I submit to often have wildly different styles. My main frustration is that the online search function sucks badly and I have been entirely unable to figure out why. Articles I "know" exist in Pubmed are not found so I end up having to export from google scholar or similar. Also the option to import full text through my library is really hit or miss. I still keep entirely separate Endnote databases for each grant/paper. Feel like it gets too overwhelming otherwise.
Reference Searching: Almost exclusively google scholar for quick off-the-cuff solutions as it seems to cast a wider net - some psychology journals are not in pubmed, some biomed/neuroscience journals are not in PsycInfo, etc. I used to be much more thorough and systematic as a student but now that I know my area pretty well I've become a lot more haphazard. A fair bit of the time, I know the likely authors or a specific article already. For genuinely new topics, I usually look for a few good review papers and branch out from there. Obviously this differs when I'm doing true systematic reviews, but I've trended towards shorter intro/discussion sections in recent years so exhaustive searches have been less necessary.
General keeping up on the literature: Really interested what others do as this is one of my biggest struggles. In part because of the sheer range of the literature I try to keep tabs on. My primary research area is addiction but within that it runs the gambit from basic to public health. I try to cut myself off at the super-basic stuff ('omics) or the super-applied stuff (e.g. policy/prevention programs). However, I'm often adopting methods and analyses from other content areas or even completely different fields of study which leads to me wanting to at least loosely keep tabs on those. Subscribe to scientific american and regularly scan nature news and science daily. I have myncbi searches set to run on a different topic M-F (e.g. addiction treatment on Monday, fmri on Tuesday, pre-clinical behavioral pharmacology on Wednesday, etc.). My newest endeavor is trying to get an RSS feed set up to pull in the tables of contents from ~60-70 journals I regularly cite and curate them. Haven't found a way to do this yet that I feel like works very well. Trying to get a combination of feedly and zapier that does it, curious if others have had success.
Inventory/supply tracking and management: Pretty basic. Have an excel spreadsheet with a list of all our consumables. Dedicated staff member reviews things every other Friday and alerts me when things get low so I can have our admin team order. Nothing counted per se, just eyeballing stuff.
Grant Budgeting/Management: This is another sore spot. Our grants management office is chronically behind and seems to have an extremely poor understanding of how the research process actually works. So projections always end up super-weird (i.e. if we have a month where recruitment lulls, projections then end up excluding important costs). I'm trying to shift towards doing this myself in excel but its a little complicated as I don't love the idea of staff seeing each other's salary (easy enough to find online, but somehow feels wrong to have them explicitly accessing spreadsheets where its listed). Still building this out, but I'm hoping to configure an excel file for each project where staff can track research spending (e.g. supplies, participant payments, scanning costs, etc.) that feeds into an excel sheet only I can access with staff salaries so I can monitor/project myself.
Communication: Probably not a good idea, but my email is basically up 100% of the time just because my team has a lot of things they like to communicate on the fly. Considered setting up a slack channel. Team is small enough presently I haven't seen the need yet. I also feel like this is tricky with regards to HIPAA. While easy to keep names and obvious identifiers out, easy to slip in "Participant 102 rescheduled for Tuesday" which - as stupid as it is - is technically identifying information from a compliance perspective.
Cross-Institute Document Sharing: This is another thing I haven't found a great solution for. I like dropbox, but more and more people are using google doc/drive, at least for manuscripts/grants. Generally fine, but I find its interface with endnote kinda clumsy. For grants, I just find it a little tougher to track who has done what in this system when we're talking about 20+ different sections. I still prefer emailing people documents they then return a renamed file with changes tracked.
Scheduling: Straight up outlook calendar for me and my staff. IT strongly discourages us syncing calendars outside their system, but its super-inconvenient because any time I schedule something I'm now checking multiple calendars.
To-Do List/Project Management: Love Asana. Tried trello, but can't get into kanban style. I keep a general to-do list for myself here, as well as project-specific to-do lists accessible by project staff. Have templates built for grants (e.g. lists of all sections for NIH and major foundation grants). Individual studies I largely leave to the relevant staff how they use, but I encourage folks to set up progress flow for participants. Its primarily utility is typically at study startup and closeout when there are a bajillion little things that need to be done (e.g. training, source form creation, data QA, prep for archiving, IRB, CT.gov, open-whatever closeouts, CONSORT diagrams generated, analysis potentially spread across multiple individuals, etc.).
Grant Opportunities: Very haphazard at the moment as I mostly target NIH. The little local grants I just rely on hearing about by email. Very curious how others follow these.
I'll probably think of others. Curious what you do - either for any of the above or anything else even peripherally relevant to managing academic life.
