Resources
There are some tools I've come across that I find particularly useful! Some of these resources have helped me with writing, others with collaboration or teaching. Please scroll or use the in page menu to peruse these tools and see if any are helpful to you!
Writing
I've used Write or Die since high school to get me out of my own head and write a bad first draft. I find that once I have something started for writing, it is way easier to think about what I actually want to write!
While I don't condone using AI to write for you, perplexity is a very useful tool for looking for papers to cite when writing a paper or a research talk. By copying and pasting my abstract into perplexity, I can ask it for similar research articles to what I've written and it will show me other articles on the same topics.
Productivity and Time Management
This book has been very influential in how I think about goals and plan my projects. This book contains helpful resources, such as guides on how to set S.M.A.R.T. goals and how to find motivation to complete your goals by focusing on your values and life direction. In addition to helping you create goals and make progress towards them, it has an action driven daily journal section (with no dates written in, so there's no guilt if you miss a day or 10). This has been the best tool I have used during grad school.
Grow a virtual forest by setting aside dedicated time to work without distractions! The forest google chrome extension will block distracting websites for a set time, and reward you with a virtual tree for taking the time to focus.
This chrome extension acts as a Pomodoro timer to increase your productivity or as a way to protect your eyes. Set a timer for how long you would like to be working, and how long you would like to take a break and look away from your screen. I use it for keeping me on time when working on boring tasks, or just protecting my eyes day to day by looking at something 20ft away for 20 seconds every 20 minutes.
Collaboration
This chrome extension is one of the most useful tools I have used. This chrome extension allows the user to highlight comment on web pages and PDFS. These comments can be public, so that anyone with a hypothesis account can see them, private so that the user is the only one who can view their comments, or set for a specific group, so a specific subset of collaborators can see and interact with the comments. This is a particularly useful tool for journal clubs, enabling a group to help each other expand their knowledge of a research article. Or it can be a helpful way for an individual to take notes and be able to easily reference them later.
Teaching
20 Teaching Strategies
While working with the Graduate Assistant Developmental, Growth, and Education Team to develop workshops for Graduate Teaching Assistants, I first learned about how to prioritize inclusivity in the college classroom. One of the resources I found extremely valuable from this time is a list of teaching strategies which can be employed to increase classroom engagement.
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Other
The genderbread person is a worksheet designed to help people understand gender, sexuality, and romantic interests. Participants can fill it out for themselves and be made aware of the combinations that can exist.
When sharing code and data with collaborators, or saving it at the completion of a project, it is best practice to include a Read-Me document which can be used to ensure it is correctly interpreted in the future. This resource from Cornell University can help you ensure your Read-Me document has all the necessary details.
