How do I stay organized?

Although I am a Biomedical engineer (PhD candidate) my adviser is Electrical, so I qualify :-)

The question, however, is far more general.

See, I have a few job offers in academia and 100% decided to stay in it and become a tenure track faculty member.

Now a question. How do I organize my stuff? I mean there is tremendous amounts of it. I am a senior PhD to about 5 other PhDs and thus most of our research and our publications are aligned. I participate in proposal preparation, write my own, write reports, etc.

Data from students 1, 2, and 3 goes into proposal. Some new schematics are made for that proposal and go into a report for project students 2 and 4 are on. Patent is prepared based on this work, too, using some data from student 5 and some other proposal. Finally, this mess results in 3 publications which are shared between co-authors.

Now repeat this a dozen times over throughout 5 years. I have copies upon copies of schematics with just one item modified (sometimes nothing modified) and it's stored all over my harddrive. Going on 200 gigs of just photos, schematics, and text.

So far I try to sort everything by general direction, project, date. For example, DBD plasma --> Tissue Sterilization --> Conferences -->

2008 --> GRC-PPS --> files.

Any good ideas? Suggestions? How do you do it?

TIA

Reply to
gogga
Loading thread data ...

i suppose no takers? :-)

we're all somehow in business and somehow alive. how do you stay organized?

Reply to
gogga

Big companies have electronic documents submitted to a large shared database.

Reply to
Adrian C

i was talking more about just one little me. just me and a few students here. each one of us uses different email systems and neither is likely to switch...

Reply to
gogga

PolyTech Forum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.