Organize Your Academic Year: Systems That Actually Work
Plan out your research this year with a system that actually helps you meet your goals, without bogging you down with extra admin. Here are the top tools researchers can use to stay organized.
Most of us enjoy taking the first few weeks of the year to reflect on our work and plan the year ahead. It’s an excellent time to lift our heads from the day-to-day to-do lists to glimpse the important milestones. It’s the time where you may remember, “Oh, right, I am working towards a PhD!” or whatever your big-picture goal may be.
What makes the biggest difference, however, isn’t doing this just at the start of the year. The key is a strategy for maintaining this attitude over the coming weeks and months. Plenty of organizational systems and tools exist to support better time management strategies, but which ones actually work?
Here, we explore five popular work management tools used across industry and academia to help researchers accomplish their work more effectively. Read on to ensure 2025 is your most productive year yet.
Top time management tools for academics
Below we outline five tried-and-true methods and tools for students, academics, and professionals trying to manage research projects. Some techniques emphasize long-term planning, while others support day-to-day tasks and organization.
The best time management strategy for you will likely be a combination of some of these. For example, maybe you’ll set up a Kanban board to track work on your next paper and categorize specific tasks using the Eisenhower Matrix. You may combine that along with a Gantt chart of your entire project over the next three years, to identify important deadlines and timeframes.
Kanban board
👍 Pros: Organize tasks, stay on top of work
👎 Cons: Lacks clear prioritization or managing multiple projects effectively
A kanban board visualizes your work in one central place, and clearly delineates tasks based on their progress (i.e. “to do”, “in progress”, “completed”, etc.).
Kanban was developed over 40 years ago by an industrial engineer at Toyota, Taiichi Ohno, who wrote about it in the book Toyota Production System in 1988. Back then, Kanban served to enhance manufacturing efficiency. Now, many references to Kanban refer to its use in software development, and in particular, in agile project management.
However, you don’t need to be a software or industrial engineer to benefit from the organizational ease of Kanban. Simply set up a board, whether physical (with paper, sticky notes, and pens) or virtually (using free software like Trello) for the project you’d like to track.
The “Getting Things Done” (GTD) system
👍 Pros: Prioritize work, reduce cognitive load
👎 Cons: Not a system for managing projects or big-picture goals
GTD is a system of organizing work, developed by a productivity consultant and published in his book in 2001. The aim of this system is to reduce the cognitive load of managing work and always knowing what to work on next. Instead, by maintaining clear organization and hierarchy, you can always easily identify what’s the next task to complete.
The key steps which make GTD different to other systems are:
Capture: Record and maintain all your to-dos in a single tool or space
Clarify: Define the next step for each; if there are no steps, categorize it as either trash, reference, or something to put on hold
Once these initial steps are complete, you can integrate GTD into your existing system for managing work. This PhD student, for example, shows how to implement a GTD-inspired work management system in Notion.
The Eisenhower Matrix
👍 Pros: Prioritize tasks, reduce workload
👎 Cons: Not a system for managing projects or big-picture goals
The Eisenhower Matrix is a simple method to prioritize tasks. Although developed by Stephen Covey, the matrix gets its name from a quote from U.S. President Eisenhower in 1954, "I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent."
To use the Eisenhower Matrix in your work, take each task you need to do and evaluate it using the matrix guidelines. You’ll find that many tasks fall into three of the four quadrants which release your obligation of actually doing the task (at least for now). This helps cut down on “less urgent” work dramatically and allow you to break down a long list of to-dos into a more manageable set.
Although this method provides a useful way to choose the next step for each bit of work you have, it doesn’t help when it comes to the big-picture organization. Like the GTD strategy, you can layer this matrix atop an existing productivity workflow you already use.
Gantt chart
👍 Pros: Long-term planning
👎 Cons: Can get complex and hard to manage; not a system for day-to-day work
The Gantt chart is unique among the tools here due to its age. Designed in the early 20th century by an engineer, Henry Laurence Gantt, the Gantt chart has been widely known since the 1920s. At the time, it was a radical new idea and was used to plan huge projects in the U.S., like the Hoover Dam and interstate highway network.
The idea, although revolutionary at the time, is simple. Create a graphical representation of different tasks over time to help you meet deadlines and complete a project. The modern Gantt chart tends to use tools like Excel or Google Sheets in order to visualize tasks over time.
Here is an example chart for an entire Ph.D. (available here). It includes everything from the stages of thesis development to the timelines for completing and submitting manuscripts.
Agile methodology
👍 Pros: Long-term planning, short-term organization
👎 Cons: Can be difficult to maintain in a non-agile environment
Although popular in software development and in industry in general, agile methodology can be applied to academic projects too. Agile was developed in the early 2000s by a group of software developers aiming to bring software products to market faster.
Since then, agile has exploded in popularity and is the dominant method used by most software developers. The agile philosophy is outlined in the manifesto. The core philosophy of agile is to break work down into iterative, short cycles (called sprints) and incorporate regular feedback to create the best product at each step.
Agile can easily be taken out of the software world and incorporated into academia and research projects. This PhD student used agile techniques to keep their thesis on track. For example, he’d hand in a portion of the thesis (i.e. a chapter or section) at 2-3 week intervals. By working in this way, he avoided any significant re-writes or alterations. As he says, “almost none of the 40K words in my intermediate submission [had] to be rewritten.”
Alternatively, you can use agile methodology to change how you even think of your work. This academic adopted the agile idea of defining clear tasks that can be accomplished in relatively short timeframes. For example, rather than aiming to “write two chapters this year”, she would set the goal “In this month, I'm going to write the conference paper that will eventually become part of x chapter”.
The main challenge you may face with agile is its dependence on your entire team functioning similarly. For example, you may finish a cycle of work only to find your supervisor or colleague hasn’t yet responded to your last iteration’s work.
Some days, research can be a gripping ride, keeping you on the edge of your seat for the results of your recent analysis or the acceptance of a paper by a prestigious journal. But most days, it is a methodical and sometimes even repetitive pursuit. It’s easy to get bogged down by the to-dos, and get lost answering low-priority emails or mindlessly re-running the same statistical tests.
Experimenting with time management tools may not sound enticing, but the payoff can be great. Not only can you cope with the slow days better, but you can create an internal accountability system to help meet your goals — goals we’re usually excited for in January but have mostly forgotten about by March.
Do you have a system you swear by to keep your research in order? Share with us and the rest of the Litmaps community below!
Thanks for this valuable information.