At this point, hopefully you have read and internalized everything under the “Managing Time” tab and have a good grasp on how you are going to be using your calendar to make sure you are doing what you need to do, when you need to do it.
Now we need a few tools in our system that will help wrangle your stuff. Now I realize that this is a very ambiguous way to phrase this, but honestly… STUFF is the best way to describe what needs to be managed in this part of the thesis process. Before you write word one of your thesis, there are two large categories of STUFF you need to be able to manage and in the Hacking the Thesis system I am proposing for you here, we will be using two separate tools to manage these two separate types of STUFF.
- Content: You need a way to begin organizing all of the ideas and notions that will become the content of your thesis. To wrangle your content, we will be using an outline.
- Materials: You need a way to organize everything that contains information related to your thesis process. To wrangle your materials, we will be using Evernote.
Now both of these tools are important to managing the pre-writing phase of your thesis work, but one will really drive the other as far as organizing the way you are thinking about everything related to your thesis. So lets cover that one first…