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I’m a very organized person. I prefer organized spaces, they make me feel calm. Have you ever walked into a classroom and almost every inch of the walls are covered with stuff – posters, art, pictures, alphabets? Those spaces are visually overwhelming to me and I really struggle to focus in those spaces. Right now, my organization for my Master’s program feels like it’s approaching one of those super overwhelming classrooms. 

Now that I’ve finished the major assignment and presented our project, I feel like I can spend some time organizing my materials. I’m currently using 3 platforms:

  1. Zotero
  2. Google sheets
  3. Google docs

Zotero is new to me and I don’t fully understand how all of the features work but I can see the potential of the program. At the moment, I have uploaded all of the articles into it and they’re organized by course. There are a few things that I do like about Zotero so far: you can highlight the article in the platform, you can use different colours of highlighting (based on themes, topics, etc), you can make notes as you’re reading and pin them in specific spots, you can access it on your desktop, the web, or through an ipad app. I have really enjoyed being able to read articles using the Zotero app on my ipad. I like the flexibility of taking my ipad with me to continue reading and knowing that my work will be saved and auto updated on my desktop and online.

I’m using Google Sheets to quickly reference different articles. I have it set up with these headings:

I have it set up this way so I can quickly refresh the summary of an article rather than scrolling through Zotero looking for that one article. I will often remember the contents of the article rather than the names or authors so having a quick reference spreadsheet is helpful. I have also added a colour coding system, I will attribute a colour to a current assignment so that I can see which ones I’ve already used. When it comes time to export a list of sources from Zotero, I already know which ones I’ve used in each assignment because of my spreadsheet. Each course has it’s own tab in the spreadsheet so it’s all consolidated into one document and I can flip through the tabs. 

I also use Google Docs. I use this more as a word processing platform but I do like that it’s really easy to link materials between my written work on the Google Sheet. For example, sometimes I need to write a longer summary of an article I’ve read and it’s too long to put in the spreadsheet. I will write up a summary in a Google doc and then grab the link and paste it in the Google Sheet entry for that article. 

Right now, these systems work for me. I imagine when it comes to working on my final project for my Master’s I will likely create another tab in the spreadsheet so that I can keep them separate from all the required readings for other courses.

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