5th yr ADHD Philosophy Grad student here,

It sounds like the anxiety is really ramping up for this person and many like them. I’d like to echo some things mentioned above and add a couple of new thoughts:

1. Google Calendar. Get rid of all the random post-its and reminders and put everything in one spot. Google calendar is great but it takes practice. Practice putting every little thing in it and color coding them–either different colors for different courses, or different colors for different kinds of things like green for assignments, blue for meetings, red for synchronous class time, etc.

2. Pick a software like Evernote, Onenote, or Teams or something similar and really take the time to watch the “how-to” videos and tutorials. Get good at it. Having a single platform that you are competent with will make your research, writing, and teaching life so much easier.

3. Identify a reference/bibliography software and repeat #2. I use Mendeley–it is far from perfect, but far superior than simply having a mess of downloaded pdf’s and having to constantly search for and through them.

4. Delete your social media. Do it now, so you have time to get used to not having it. I’m quite serious about this. Do you have to delete everything? No, but you should delete as much as you can. You will be surprised at how much your friends are quite happy to receive a text, phone call, or email from you, rather than the often distracting litany of facebook posts, IG stories, tweets, etc.

Don’t forget that competence is one of the strongest weapons against anxiety. I’m speaking about the “it’s too difficult/I don’t know where to start” anxiety. Take a narrow, one-thing-at-a-time approach to gain the competence you need in the particular softwares/applications, etc. That will really increase your confidence and ability to “break through” the difficult times.

Seconding Julia, I use a combination of Todoist and Evernote to organize almost everything. They’re wonderful and I don’t know how I survived without them.

Todoist keeps track of to-dos on a day-by-day basis; Evernote keeps track of my long-term plans and basically everything else I want to be able to search and find.

Some people say that you can use Evernote to do both things, but I find it helpful to separate them. Todoist has a lot of trivial to-dos that I don’t want cluttering up my work life unless I specifically am in the mode of clearing my to do list.

I use Mendeley for organizing papers. I type up notes on each paper in LaTeX and attach them to the paper in Mendeley. It’s really helpful for me to have notes saved so that when I’m writing a paper, I can go back and remember everything that I have read without re-reading it.

I use Excel spreadsheets to track some categories of professional things (upcoming conference deadlines; papers under review; grant/prize submissions; …) and have recurring reminders in my todo list to check for opportunities of each kind. I also use Excel for budgeting and reimbursement.

I take notes in text files or actual paper, have a bibtex file for bibliography and use google tasks. The killer feature of the latter is that it google doesn’t care about developing it, so it does not have any features that get in my way. It’s basically an itemised list with check boxes. Also, I can use it as a plugin in gmail which means that (a) I always see my tasks when I see my emails and (b) I can use a “create a task from this email” button”. Ok, these are the actual killer features. All the other note taking apps I tried failed because I would not look at them. But I look at my email.

If you are a bit of a technophile, using an App might bring a different kind of joy to your work. But just as well you may just end up (ab)using “trying out apps and learning how to use them” as a different kind of procrastination.

I’m a bit of a technophile and I procrastinated llike this a lot. I tried a lot of other things, including various implementations of Getting Things Done, that I all found to be incredibly overwrought and getting in my way *a lot* by trying to enforce a particular ideology and structure. I found the task of keeping track of my progress in these apps more arduous than just doing my stuff. Matter of fact, I don’t think most PhD studies involve anything that comes close to be complex enough to necessitate a flowchart. Different things work for different people of course.

The only “ideology” I follow that I found useful is Inbox Zero. All Emails I get are either noted and archived, answered and archived or made into a task and archived.

LaTeX has a steep learning curve, especially if you haven’t done anything with programming or markup languages in the past. But it will pay off, and your papers, syllabi, and other documents will look much better than those of other people.

Familiarity with LaTeX also gives you access to Jabref, a very good bibliography management system that uses .bib files.

I also want to recommend Hypernomicon. It is research organization software developed by Jason Winning, a philosophy PhD. It’s another system that has a learning curve but the information you put on builds on itself better than any other program I have seen before. I have used it for some time now and have been extremely happy with it.