Hello, my name's Tom and welcome back to my channel and to another PhD vlog.
Now, I'm very aware that it is currently
the beginning of a new academic year and
so there are currently lots and lots of
PhD's starting their course of study all
over the globe. The aim of today's video,
then, is to let you in on some of the
software that I've found really, really
useful to my studies in the two years
since I was in the same position that
you are now. Now, if you're one of the
lovely people who is a year or further
into their PhD already then I'd really
appreciate it if you could drop your own
thoughts down below in the comment as
that will be really useful I'm sure to
any new PhD's who do stumble across this
video. And, if you have just started your
own PhD, then, potentially, you might find
some of my other videos interesting or
useful and so do please consider
subscribing (and potentially turning on the
notifications) and hopefully you will
find some useful bits of wisdom in there
somewhere. Without further ado, then,
let's crack on with it! So, I wanted to
start by recommending the app which is
the absolute workhorse of my PhD and
that is Scrivener. So, a PhD thesis, indeed
any piece of dissertation-length work
from undergraduate upwards, is a
long piece of work. It's going to consist
of lots of chapters each consisting of
lots of sections within that and that is
a lot of writing to both keep within
your head or on the page. And word
processors such as Microsoft Word or
Google Docs aren't exactly optimized for
this. People who do use Microsoft Word or
Google Docs for writing their thesis
tend to find they have lots and lots of
folders with lots of different chapters
and sections in them. And when you want
to find a piece of text to maybe
incorporate into something you're
working on six months later it can be a
real struggle to track down that
particular passage of writing on your
hard drive.
Scrivener, however, operates slightly
differently. See, Scrivener, rather than
expecting you to keep all your writing
within one long document, instead allows
you to divide your writing up into short
sections which it call "scrivenings"
within one file, all viewable within the
same window.
It then lets you sort these "scrivenings"
into different folders or, indeed, nest
"scrivenings" inside one another in the
browser window on the left hand side of
the screen. When writing such a long
piece of work potentially over a number
of years, what this allows you to do is
at some points focus in on very specific
bits of writing and other times be able
to take that macro view of seeing
a whole chapter or the whole
thesis at once. Furthermore, Scrivener has
this great side-by-side or top-bottom
view which allows you to see two "scrivenings",
two bits of writing, at the same
time. Scrivener is available for both Mac
and for Windows and there are some
differences between the two versions but
not all that much. The basic
concept is the same and it is really
that basic concept that makes it so
great. There are also some other options
out there of software that works in a similar way and one of the
biggest competitors is Ulysses, however
Scrivener is the original and I got it
quite early on and it will always have a
soft spot for me because of that. Finally,
if you want to check it out, there is a
free trial available on the Scrivener
website and it lets you try it out for
30 days to see whether it works for you
and I'd really recommend doing that and
I have a feeling you will probably end
up buying it in the end. (None of these
are adverts by the way, I do just get
strangely passionate about apps and
software that work really well). So, let's
continue with app recommendation number
two and that is Bear. Now, if you've
watched my video from some time ago now where I talked through my system for
taking notes on articles and books that
I'm reading, you'll see that, at that
point, I was using Evernote. And Evernote
is a still a great option if you want a
dedicated note taking application.
However, I found that over time evernote
kept having more and more features added
on to it and, in the end, it kind of did a
lot more than I wanted it to and it was
really easy to get bogged down into
thinking about what font I was going to
be writing my notes in or how I was
gonna format them. And, actually, I didn't
really need that. All I needed was a nice
clean space where I could tap away for 20 minutes a
stream of hopefully not
incomprehensible garbage. And Bear does
this really, really well. In place of
Evernote's "notebook" system, what it does is
it has a tagging system where all you do
is, anywhere within the body of a note,
you simply kind of hashtag in a word
and it will collect together all of the
different notes with that tag in them in
a really easy to use browser format.
Again, you can nest tags in
a similar way to folders but I just find
it really intuitive and great to use.
Unfortunately, Bear is only available on
Mac and iOS devices so Windows users you may have to go elsewhere,
however I think the point still stands
generally that it is really, really
useful (and particularly if you're
currently early on) to start off with a
note system which is just gonna let you
take lots and lots of notes but also to
organize those in a way where you're
never gonna be too far away from the
thought that you once wrote down that
you now need to locate again. For app
recommendation number three it's on to
reference management. And I'm going to
kind of cheat with this one and sort of
half recommend two different bits of
software. So, referencing software allows
you to keep all the literature that
you've read (or potentially need to read)
in one dedicated program. And,
particularly, its angled towards making
it really easy to use those references
and those citations within work that
you're writing, usually in a format or a
system the developers call "Cite While You Write". Now, in the past, I've tried
doing this manually and entering in all
my references
just with bracket, date, colon,
page number and it was a really tough
thing to do because it meant that,
often when I deleted a citation, I'd
forget that I deleted that and then my
bibliography would be massive. Or I'd
add a citation and miss it off the
reference list. Also, it was a huge
problem if I wanted to send someone just
part of a chapter or just one chapter
because then I had to look at this
massive
bibliography from my whole thesis and
try and work out which ones were in that
chapter. Referencing software takes away
all of this hassle and I would really
really recommend finding one that works
for you. Now, for the first couple of
years of my PhD, I was a huge advocate of
Mendeley. Mendeley is free and it also
allows you to keep PDFs in the cloud and
to annotate them and highlight them and
take notes on them in a really great
manner which means they're accessible
from multiple devices. However, I have
recently sold out and stumped up for
EndNote. And I did this for a number of
reasons, but the main one is that EndNote
allows you to use plain text citations
in a special format which you can type
in absolutely anywhere, whether you're
working in bear or Scrivener or Word and
which it will then be able to read when
you finally come to format a reference
list in Word later on. And this is
something that Mendeley I almost am
absolutely sure does not have and which
I find massively, massively useful. It's
worth saying that EndNote is a little
bit clunkier the Mendeley (somehow
because Mendeley is also quite clunky)
yet I find that particular bit of
functionality so useful. And if you do
decide to go for EndNote rather the
Mendeley then there are some really good
student discounts which means it's
slightly more financially palatable than
it could be. Recommendation four, then, is
Things 3. Doing a PhD involves doing
a huge number of very different tasks
and, if you're as unorganized as me, then
keeping track of all the things that
you've got to do will be a huge
challenge. Particularly, it can be really
easy to really focus in on one area of
responsibility that you've got such as
teaching and almost completely neglect
something else such as thesis writing. So a
powerful task management app can really
help you both to keep a track of all the
things that you need to do but also to
schedule those in a manner that
is achievable and timely. I've used a
number of different apps like this over
the years including Wunderlist and
Todoist which I used for a
considerable amount of time and I think
is really worth checking out
particularly as it is mostly free. However, I recently moved
myself over to an app called Things 3.
Now, this is the most expensive app I'm
gonna recommend here (particularly for
the pretty simple tasks that it fulfills).
However, I found it's kind of worth it.
It's got a really slick design which
means you want to use it and it also
syncs pretty seamlessly between
different devices, something wish Todoist didn't always do in my experience. One
of the particularly great things about
Things 3 is the way that it lets you
really nest tasks within bigger projects
so you can have a task within a heading
within a project within an area of
responsibility and I just find that
really useful for me being able to get
my head around all the things that I
need to do. It also really helps with
being able to plan projects because I
can have a chapter as a project and I
can really break down different sections
with different headings within that
project and then I can work out
time-limited, short tasks. I just find
that so, so useful and I find it a lot
more intuitive than a lot of the other
apps I've used. At 5 is perhaps my most
lukewarm recommendation from
this list and that is Toggle. I've
mentioned on my video about Deep
Work how I find it really useful to
keep a track of how I'm using my time.
Indeed, I'll link to that video up
wherever they go. Being really mindful
about this is a fairly new development
for me but the app that I've been using
to keep a track of how much time I've
been spending on different projects is
Toggle. Now, I'm pretty sure Toggle has
actually been designed for service-based businesses where different
employees need to keep a track of how
much time they've been spending on
different contracts. However, I've kind of
been using it to my own purposes as a
way of tracking how long I've been
working for and what project I've been
working on or element of a project I've
been working on for that particular time.
So, in essence, it's a glorified stopwatch
but that doesn't mean I haven't been
finding it really useful. Essentially,
it's the concept that I'm
advocating for here rather than the
Toggle app itself and, indeed, if you use
the Pomodoro Technique for example there
are actually a number of different apps
they're such as Pomodoro Tracker (I
think is one) which will
both act as your 25 minute timer
for your Pomodoros but will also let
you track those and label them
with what you were doing with that
Pomodoro which can work in a similar way.
So, that just about wraps us up. These
five apps (or, well, I mean it ended up
being a lot more than five), but these
apps are all ones which I use every
single day in the course of my studies
and I don't see that changing at any
point in the next 12 months as I head
towards completion. No doubt technology
can be a very, very distracting force
when you're working on a long-term
project which at times will definitely
seem tedious. However, it can also be a
massive time-saver and really help you
to be working to your best and getting
your actually best work done. As I said
below, if there's anything that you think
I've missed or you massively disagree
with me about any of these apps then do
let me know down in the comments both
for me (maybe I'll change what I'm using)
or for anyone else that comes to watch
this video after you have. Likewise, if
you think this video is a vague net
positive for the world, if it's been
useful for you then please do consider
giving it a thumbs up (that kind of boost
its rankings a little bit and helps
other people stumble across it too).
Other than that, thank you very much for
watching and have a great week!
