One of my tips for grad school is to come up with a systematic way to stay organized and consistant. I'm not at ALL tidy or organized in real life, but at work I NEED a good system to keep my research and sanity in line.
Something I quickly learned to get under control as a grad student was my email. Between coworkers, campus-related announcements, department-related announcements, lab-related announcements, as well as personal emails, bacn, spam, etc., it can get overwhelming pretty quick.
Colleen Wainwright of Communicatrix changed my life when I saw this video on how to use the filters function of Gmail to automatically sort incoming mail. This is a few years old, but still super useful.
Show me yer rig! (Gmail filters edition) from communicatrix on Vimeo.
I now have all my email accounts get routed directly to my Gmail account which then auto-filters them into folders. The best part of this system is they are accessibly from anywhere, and if I go off-line for several hours or days, I don't have so many new messages in my inbox demanding attention when I return. Instead, I can easily find where the most important messages are, and then skim over the rest when I have time.
I also love Gmail's advanced search functions to quickly look up an old messages. For example, if I'm trying to find an old email I sent that had an attachment, I search "from:me has:attachement" and it will narrow down to find it easily.
Something I quickly learned to get under control as a grad student was my email. Between coworkers, campus-related announcements, department-related announcements, lab-related announcements, as well as personal emails, bacn, spam, etc., it can get overwhelming pretty quick.
Colleen Wainwright of Communicatrix changed my life when I saw this video on how to use the filters function of Gmail to automatically sort incoming mail. This is a few years old, but still super useful.
Show me yer rig! (Gmail filters edition) from communicatrix on Vimeo.
I now have all my email accounts get routed directly to my Gmail account which then auto-filters them into folders. The best part of this system is they are accessibly from anywhere, and if I go off-line for several hours or days, I don't have so many new messages in my inbox demanding attention when I return. Instead, I can easily find where the most important messages are, and then skim over the rest when I have time.
I also love Gmail's advanced search functions to quickly look up an old messages. For example, if I'm trying to find an old email I sent that had an attachment, I search "from:me has:attachement" and it will narrow down to find it easily.
I know Gmail isn't the only service that has these functions (and is likely not the best). Still, when I hear people use Gmail and don't auto-filter their incoming email, I'm just like: "WHAT?? HOW DO YOU LIVE??" And then I punch them in the face.
The end.
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