What are some effective ways to manage your time when working on a project that requires a lot of research?

Break your project into manageable tasks and prioritize them. Plan Wisely: Allocate specific times for different activities, including breaks. Adopt Time Management Techniques: Techniques like the Pomodoro can enhance focus. (working for 25 minutes followed by a 5-minute break), Use tech tools: Leverage apps for research, e.g., sci- space, organization, and note-taking. Establish Boundaries: Communicate your work hours to minimize interruptions. Prioritize Self-Care: Regular breaks and a healthy lifestyle are key to sustained productivity. Review and adjust regularly: Seek feedback early: Regular check-ins with supervisors or peers can ensure you're on the right track. This has really helped me navigate my way as a graduate student.

Effective research management involves defining clear goals, identifying key questions, creating a structured plan, setting deadlines, and conducting a literature review. It includes data collection and analysis, synthesizing findings, and drafting key points for a research paper. Regular goal evaluation and time management are crucial for success, and adaptability is key in the face of unexpected discoveries or challenges.

Conduct a literature survey to find the optimal approach instead of relying on the hit-and-trial approach. Follow the roadmap you've created, analyze your results, and proceed to the next step accordingly.

The first question one has to ask themselves is if they had a convincing script. Like a movie or a novel, all want a meaningful project that has known and established contributions to real-time problems with the target audience appreciating them. On paper, six elements decide the practicability of a research project: novelty, betterment, existing data, scope, methodology, and the links among them. The scope should complement or address the established needs of the concerned industry, which are to be approached by an effective set of methods under the given conditions and resources derived from the latest & and authentic sources. If this script is acceptable to the targeted audience, would lead to the project framework and then the roadmap.

An effective way to manage time in research is necessarily initiated by defining global and specific goals. This is followed by some details about the objectives and methodology. Following this path and being flexible are likely to induce a good output in effective time.

3. Literature research, API research and basic time-line planning + Is there existing code or a pretrained model (are they in a usable state) + What metric is used for optimization (or as a proxy) + License: Can you use the code? + 80/20: What is the quickest way to get clean/ meaningful results results + How powerful does the model need to be + What is your optimization loop budget (time/ compute/ person days) + What deploy time problems can the model handle + A Gantt-chart can help with a rough estimate + Plan buffer time for unforseen issues

Before thinking of the planning, it's important to check whether they have the optimum project roadmap. The roadmap would define the themes and the elements of the concerned project, which would define the stages of the project. The correlation of these stages compared against the project objectives and the timeline would validate the plan's practicability. If the plan is practicable, the first thing the researcher should do is make a work-life balance plan for all those involved in it. This should occur on an individual level by answering the most important question of being able to invest the required time, intellect, and energy in the project without negatively affecting the individual life. This agreement will form teamwork.

The research process starts with confirming and strengthening the research goals and detailed objectives. Keep focusing on the planned process alongside some backup plans in case some parts are not going as expected.

For planning, I like to do previously a draft on paper (where I can put some arrows to connect things that were not connected previously) and, later, to add everything in a sheet. After organizing everything in a sheet, I start to define all the things that are related do that part - literature review, experiments planning, experiments time duration, analysis time duration, more literature review for results discussion -, adding them on the same sheet. Therefore, considering the time for everything (and also other parallel projects), I can organize the tasks in a calendar, in order to make it achievable (since I know that, for example, it will take 3 hours for one experiment, so I won't try to do other experiment at this same period).

Evaluating your sources can be effectively initiated by some discussions with your collaborators or networks, as well as literature studies related to your sources. Furthermore, it is important to compare the outcomes of each research step with some previous works, as it is also useful to seek holes that you can fill as a novelty.

Taking notes is an important part of the research process, as it is very useful for tracking your progress to avoid critical mistakes in every subsequent step. While taking notes, citing related literatures is also important to ensure that your sources are reliable and accurate.

Taking notes is important for your research, but taking notes in a way that you can easily find them is even more important. I always preferred to take notes on paper, but I realized that taking notes digitally is better and easier for later searching. Some programs, such as Notion, has free templates for scientific notes organization, already with the main informations (Title, authors, year, magazine, DOI etc) and then you just add your note. When you need it, you can search using any of the words and find it.

Reviewing your own work can be challenging, since you're so into that work that it's hard to find the mistakes. I usually prefer to do it after a couple of days without even thinking about this part, and also asking not only for my supervisor, but also for a colleague. Correction softwares are also welcome, especially to find grammar errors in other language.

I have found it helpful to create an excel sheet on each concept where papers are succinctly summarized. I have research question, methodology, conclusions as some of the heads.

While there is an endless scope of references and sources, the critical point is to understand where a researcher has to stop and what is ‘sufficient’. It's easier to say than done. Another heuristic comes from checking the holistic view plus semantic analysis: the researcher should cover the critical content and involved domains/ categories/ parameters. Identifying unknowns is a dark zone because of the likelihood of skipping ‘grey and black swans’. We have to admit any research is always risky, but practice makes perfect.

Documentation is very important. As you pour through literature sources, previous work and find out more on the state-of -art, do not forget to make short summaries of key findings. It's an effective way of time managemement to curate your findings along the way.

Put your progress on MS Power Point slides! Put your numerical data on MS Excel files or other tools that you prefer! Stay focus on the research targets!