How to organize your Thesis with Notion
I recently started writing my Master's Thesis and before starting the Thesis I realized that I needed a good organizing system. During my studies in CDTM I learned how to use Notion to manage projects and having such a positive experience, I decided to use it for my research too. Long story short: best.decision.ever. Let me explain to you why.
Notion is weird at the beginning. So many features, workspaces, pages, “is it really just another notepad?”… Notion has many different features and templates but its power relies on how much you can customize it. For the Thesis, I started to use their template but soon I realized it that I need it something adapted to me.
I created a template to explain to you how can you use Notion for the Master Thesis and some of the benefits I found with it.
Content part
In my case, my Thesis can be separated into two different topics that I need to tackle: Quantum Computing and Peer-to-Peer energy trading. Besides, there are mathematical tools or coding skills (Python) that I need to learn or improve (Tools), this is the reason why my content part looks like this:
In the template, you will find a page for your main research topic, writing the thesis, and English. The last two help me create an outline and collect resources to improve my academic writing and my English.
Main research topic
I believe this is the part where you need to customize it the most. Maybe you need to include lists of current projects, maybe you need to include a list of videos, write your own thoughts… However, I included what it helped me the most so far: the Glossary and the Relevant literature.
When dealing with your Master Thesis you may encounter new concepts or words. The more specialized your topic is, the more relevant a Glossary becomes. I usually write down the word and add my own definition or copy-paste the dictionary or Wikipedia definition. Then I can always look back when this concept comes up again. Bonus tip: if you go through the glossary from time to time 1) you will learn it better, 2) you will realize how many things you have learned so far, which can be an ego booster.
No matter what Master Thesis you deal with, you will need to read literature that is relevant to your topic. I decided to keep a list with all the Relevant Literature to me in a list with the following columns:
- Title of the papers
- Status: have I read it already, do I need to read or can it be put as a backlog for extra sources?
- Summary: Short description of the paper to not have to re-read it again.
- Tags: write tags that will help you find this article. You don’t need to use the ones from the article, but it is better to use what stands out.
- Link
- Author
- Accessed
- Promising: I use this to classify the papers that might be crucial for my research or that will give me the best ideas.
You can include other columns such as “how many times has this paper been cited”, “ID of the paper”, “References to what papers”, “Type of document (Thesis, Conference paper, Paper….)”…
By using the view and the filter function, I created three views: the entire list, the list of papers I have read, and the list of papers I need to read. This helps as the list becomes bigger and bigger. And believe me, it will.
Meetings
Do you meet with your supervisor? Do you conduct expert interviews? Have you talked to someone and now you don’t remember what you talked about?
I wanted to keep track of this by including a table in which I write the notes for every meeting I have about my Master Thesis. I believe that at the beginning it is very important to avoid misunderstandings.
Requirements of the University
This depends on each university but when registering the Thesis and also submitting it, there is some bureaucracy involved. It is worth checking the requirements before starting the Thesis and writing them down here to always keeping them in your mind.
Calendar or work planning
In the Mechanical Engineering Faculty at the TUM, it is mandatory to submit an exposé at the beginning of your writing process. In this exposé, you need to write how you plan your thesis and what resources you need. I think this is particular to the Mechanical Engineering faculty but it does motivate you to plan ahead and be realistic about what you can and you can’t do (which is also a perfect topic to discuss with your advisor). With Notion, you can use the Calendar view function and even integrate reminders or use the Timeline view to have it as a Gantt.
Now that I walked you through the template, which you can find here, I want to comment on how it has helped me so far.
Besides that I believe that being organized doesn’t hurt, having the relevant literature in one place with tags allowed me to speed up the writing process of the state-of-art. Of course, it takes a while to know what you want to write and how to structure the information, but I didn’t spend time looking for the papers because I knew how to do so. It also helps me when discussing ideas or sharing literature because I can quickly find the reference or figure I want to show.
With the calendar feature, I can assess my performance and keep a “diary” of my work, which helps to track how much time I spend on each section and to also estimate better future work.
Besides, being able to customize it, makes me have everything in one place at my own taste, while having an overview of my work. Additionally, it forces me to write more and jot down my thoughts, and encourages me to find synergies or come up with new ideas.
However, there are three downsides that I see using Notion:
- Lock-in effect: you depend on a third party to 1) keep your work safe, 2) keep your work. Period. If Notion servers would disappear, what would happen to all my work? I regularly download the HTML files into my computer for this reason.
- Upfront time investment: If you have worked with Notion before, it might be natural for you to use it. If you are new, it might take a while until you familiarize yourself with it. This is one of the reasons why I created the template.
- Commitment: all of the effort, the cool feature, and the customization don’t matter unless you use always use it. If you go from one tool to the other or have different things in different places, the benefits of using the tool dilute.
There are many ways and tools nowadays to organize your work and I can only encourage each one of you to find what fits you best to your experience and your taste. There is no need to get into a trend (Notion, Nuclino, you name it) if it doesn’t work for you. However, the reason to share this is to give a quick introduction to a tool I have found very useful.
