I try to get my PhD work done as quickly, or rather as efficiently, as possible. I’d much rather be having a pint than reading Deleuze. So I put effort in at the front end of my writing process, while I was beginning to put together my literature review, to create a speedy and reliable work flow. I use 3 excellent pieces of software to minimize the amount of time I spend re-reading books, hunting for forgotten citations, and hunched over a computer screen.

Here are the highlights of my techniques that you are welcome to steal for your own purposes. I use a Mac, but this software all works well on PCs too.

Organize your thoughts and the information you’re collecting in one place: Evernote, $45 per year

It’s Friday around 11am (ok, 1:30pm). You’ve made it to the library and sat down in front of a stack of 11 books on critical theory and you have a pub crawl in 5 hours. How are you going to slam through those books while still retaining enough information to write 3,000 words in your lit review next month? Evernote on your smartphone will be your magic wand, Hermione. Alohomora.

When there’s a quote or a section you want to capture, create a new note in the Evernote app on your phone, hold the page down, and take a picture. If you’re sloppy, it’ll look like this:

You can be haphazard like me, or be more careful to capture only the words. I find it doesn’t matter. Evernote’s OCR (optical character recognition) turns the picture into a searchable document with pretty amazing accuracy. Run a search for ‘Foucault’ in Evernote later and the software will pull up every instance in every page you save (warning: don’t do that search if, like me, you study prison). You can use this technique to capture paragraphs, pages, or entire chapters, if that doesn’t violate anyone’s copyright. Make sure you capture the page number in the image or note it somewhere, or you will be SOL later trying to figure out where it’s from.

Pro tip: running a quote through Google will get you the page number and publication about 65% of the time if you’ve lost the citation.

The benefit of taking a picture of the page, instead of typing – or worse, handwriting! – relevant quotes is that you’ll find other things on the page that you didn’t notice the first time. Annotating the book directly will make your life so much easier when you’re going back later to see what passage you were saving, but writing in library books is completely immoral.

Evernote is much more capable than my distractable mind mind. I can save everything in EN: writing ideas, notes from presentations, PDFs, bookmarks, videos and audio recordings. It’s essentially a messy digital filing cabinet. The EN Webclipper for Safari and Chrome (does anyone still use Firefox?) is indispensable for saving anything on the Internet.

Here are some of the notebooks I have for my PhD right now:

Pro tip: I like to use notebooks to remind myself of what I need to go back and go through  – ‘Add to written bits’ for example are things I want to add into my draft that I’ll forget about otherwise.

The inside of a notebook ends up looking something like this:

Ah, Scrivener – it’s full of more features than you’re ever going to need, it’s stable as a rock, and it’s only $45 for a lifetime license. I set all my Scrivener files to automatically save to Dropbox (use Dropbox, or another cloud backup!) literally every 2 seconds. When I spilled Coke all over my computer 2/3 of the way into my first chapter I was able to take some deep breaths, install Scrivener on a friend’s machine, and continue an hour later from literally the exact half-typed word from which I’d stopped. Scrivener is also the best way to transcribe interviews, but that’s not our topic right now.

I’ve found that the most efficient way go from a pile of sources collected in Evernote to an actual written chapter is to create section headers in the ‘Research’ section of a Scrivener project and then copy and paste every piece of text/image I’ve decided I want to use (using my Evernote tags) into a separate page in each section. Looking through what you’ve collected and designing an outline takes a few days, but afterwards writing is much easier–I just go through and write each section. If you  need positive affirmation like me, you can change the icon next to each page to a happy check mark once you’ve written it in, like this:

Then once the draft is written, export a bibliography from Zotero and add it in Scrivener. Only after that, export it to Word, do a final edit for formatting and clarity, triple-check your Zotero bibliography, and send it to your supervisor so she can cross all of it out.

A few final tips:

• You’re going to be spending 4-8 hours a day at least one day per week (don’t exaggerate) sitting at your computer writing. Don’t make your back problem worse. Invest in an external keyboard and mouse and put your laptop up on a stack of books or some shelves so that you can sit straight up and work. I also take my laptop over to a bookcase or counter to work standing up.

• Taking pictures of your screen, or screencapping, will also be really helpful for you– especially when working with electronic documents that don’t let you copy and paste, or when sending funny pictures to your friends. Change your screen cap shortcuts in Preferences to something you’ll remember and use.

That’s the a basic summary of how I write fast enough to get to the pub crawl, I mean evening lecture. It’s all for $90, or less than 1 day at a conference. What tricks have you picked up along the way?

Author Bio: Alyssa Bernstein is a PhD Candidate at the School of Law at the Queen’s University of Belfast.