Being a productivity enthusiast I have always been struggling with the feeling of discontent toward the way I manage my studious life, including my PhD journey at the moment. I have always been on the lookout for the best workflow for my PhD, trying various methods and tools which happened to become a rather rough journey and not necessarily transforming me into a productivity speedster.

But this year I have a feeling that I’m getting nearer to achieving a kind of optimal PhD workflow thankfully due to the discovery of two things: Bullet Journal (BuJo) plus Traveler’s Notebook (TN) and Freeter app. I might write more about BuJo in another post but sufficient to say that my analog workflow has been getting better since I started to practice BuJo-TN.

For another part of the equation namely the digital workflow, now let me explain how this aspect has finally met possibly its most credible solution yet, namely the Freeter app. I’ve just discovered this software on April 10 thanks to an article by Alex Kaul its developer through my Pocket app but at that time I couldn’t yet fully understand its functionality from reading the article and its website at freeter.io. Only by today April 14 I managed to download, install and test run it on my machine.

Who’s Freeter for?

Turns out that Freeter is indeed a brilliant software for managing computer/online-based workflows such as of those bloggers, developers, project managers, etc. While academic research isn’t mentioned as one of its potential application, Freeter can be highly relevant for such purpose since the nature of academic research today is strongly attached to digital contents alongside communication and collaboration on global scale.

When I explored Freeter I feel that something really clicked here in my workflow and this app should not only be known to me. I was in a state of digital dormant renouncing myself from exposing my thoughts through the social media. But I feel so compelled about getting more people to know about the software and to give it a try. Such inspiration has eventually led me to write my first blogpost on Medium as you’re reading now with regards to managing PhD workflow with Freeter.

What can Freeter do?

Basically Freeter is a software which allow us to create functional logical links of our digital contents, be it online or on our machine, within dedicated dashboards. For example I can have my email window, todo list, web browser and app links inside my Freeter dashboard which makes all the things relevant to my project tasks to be instantaneously within reach. Therefore my workflow would be minimally interrupted from the needs to search for certain files in the middle of my work or to type long commands through the terminal. In addition, I could keep track of my work progress and my communication medium at the same time.

Licence

The free Freeter version lets its user to create up to three projects and five tabs for each project. If you need more than those allowance, you can buy the Pro version for $29 from its website. The Pro version lets its user to install on any computer where the user is the primary user. I’m currently using the free version and I think it could be sufficient enough for my PhD needs as of now.

PhD Workflow with Freeter

Since I haven’t really delved into Freeter quite long enough and am recognising research as a confidential matter, the Freeter layouts here are generic ones but those structures should basically represent the way I intend to use Freeter. For my first Freeter project I named it as PhD and linked it to a folder namely Freeter-PhD. I then created five tabs namely Primary, My Design, Writing, Reading and Tutor.

Primary Tab

Primary tab basically serves as the homepage of my PhD Project Dashboard. Here I put my research title, aims and objectives using the text widgets. I can use the todo list widget to list down all the big tasks, deadlines or milestones. For inspiration, I have downloaded a poster on Einstein’s quote and use the image widget to display it inside the dashboard. I use the webpage widget to display my Google Calendar so that I could view my daily agenda.