Take a mental note. What’s your internal filing system?
When it comes to data organization, consider how your brain works. Do you recall based on a timeline (e.g. in 2022, I was working on ___ research)? Maybe you categorize by institution or project? Or do you prefer to file memories, work, to-do’s by topic? Understanding your instinctual method for organization can help you to manage your research in a manner that’s optimal for you.
Thinking about this ahead of time and using best practices will ensure you remain consistent and waste less time finding data later, so you have more time to do work! You may want to organize your data according to some of these directory schemes:
| Project | Date |
| Course | Researcher |
| Laboratory | Dataset |
| Specimen | Data type |
Learn more about simple things you can do to improve your file management and organization.