organizational systems improve with time/use

[kareina]

Right from the beginning of my PhD project I had a lot of reading to do to get up to speed on the project. Before I started this project I knew nothing about Tasmanian geology, and very little about metamorphic petrology. Sure, I knew that they could come up with estimates on the temperature and pressure at which minerals grew, but I knew nothing of how they accomplished that. However, all of that reading I did during the first couple of years of my project was just that--reading. I didn't do much (any?) note-taking beyond the required "literature review" that I needed to turn in with my "preliminary plan" for the PhD project. Indeed, once I'd turned that in and proceeded with the data-collection phase of my project I found myself doing less and less reading of the geologic literature. Two years into the project, in June of 2007, I was conversing with one of my SCA friends about the 100-a-day challenge that is done now and then in the SCA--where people choose to practice a skill (often sword fighting) by doing 100 repetitions of that skill a day--the goal being to see how many days in a row one can manage, and see how much the skill improves whilst doing it. Thinking of that challenge I decided to apply a variant to my studies and challenge myself to read something from the geologic literature every day. 100 being too small a number where reading is concerned, I settled upon "1000 words a day" (or roughly the equivalent of reading for abstracts) as my goal. And promptly set up a spreadsheet to track the days, what I read, and if I had any comments on the reading. Initially I only recorded the author name and year of publication, but after a bit of time I started also recording the title of the paper (or book) and the name of the journal in which it was published. However, other than those comments, I still wasn't really taking notes.

Sometime more recently one of my friends persuaded me to obtain a program designed to help one organize their "to-do" list. Realizing that I'd been downloading more papers "to read later" than I was actually reading, I begin a category in that program called "things to read" and started making a note of things there when I downloaded them. Sure, that information was also in the spreadsheet, where the "comment" would say something like "downloaded a copy to read later", but without making a list, I wouldn't necessarily remember to read it later. Months elapsed before I realized that when I added a new paper to the list, I should also use the "notes" field to record *why* I'd downloaded it. Did I find it while doing a search for a specific subject? Was it referenced in another paper and I thought I should follow up on it? Did my advisor give it to me to read?

Skip ahead to the present--I'm now working on a part of my thesis wherin I need to talk about *why* I chose certain methods to do certain tasks. This means that I need to make reference to other geologists who chose similar methods, or to papers which used a different method which won't work for me because of ____. So now, I am once again taking notes as I look through the list of papers I've got (by the way, using a program like EndNote to generate bibliographies is a wonderful way to keep papers organized. I've got extra fields set up in EndNote just for my own filing. One I call "label" which is a one-word description of the general topic (e.g. "Tasmania" or "crystallization") and also the name of the folder in which the paper is filed. I've also got a field named "format/where" in which I list if I've got that particular paper in pdf, or a paper copy, or I checked it out from the library, or it is in the department thesis cabinet collection. This makes it simple to find papers again if I need them. but I digress, I was in the middle of a sentence when this parenthetical note began :-) trying to find those which address the issue upon which I'm currently writing. As I find them, I type quotes into the thesis itself, knowing that they will be edited and changed, once I've got all of the quotes gathered and know the big picture of what I will want to say. I am also copying those quotes into the LifeBalance scheduling program, so that I still have them later, if I ever need to look such things up again.

Then I do my progress report for the day in a more public setting than behind a cut:

Today's note-taking added only 494 words to the thesis, but skimming over the articles from which the notes were taken gave me a fair bit of useful information. No doubt if I hadn't been lacking motivation to work for all of the morning and afternoon I'd have accomplished more. Oh well, tomorrow I don't have the option to let the daylight hours slip away without working--I need to meet one of the departmental post-docs at Uni to learn the correct method for crushing samples to extract detrital zircons so that we can determine the ages at which they formed, and therefore have an idea of the oldest age the sandstone in which they accumulated could have formed (which is some time before it got buried deeply enough to metamorphose into my much prettier than a sandstone samples). It will also be useful to see if the zircons are the same age as my old generation of monazites, since they could have formed in an earlier episode of metamorphism, or they could have been detrital (already existed and got deposited with the sand/mud which ultimately became my rocks).