Staying Organized: Mendeley

If you are new to graduate school or you are coming back after a long time in school, Mendeley is a great tool to look into.  Last year when I came back to start my MSW, I passed a sign for a Mendeley workshop in the library, and I signed up for a brief overview.  Today, Mendeley is one of my best organizational tools.

Mendeley has a few key selling points.

1. It can be accessed via the internet and via multiple devices.  Hence, I can access it from a computer lab on campus or from home or from my tablet.  
2. It is just as good at being an e-reader and note-taking space as it is at being a reference manager.  I love this.  This means that I can keep everything together in one place.  Yeah, EndNote lets you highlight, but its highlighter is super buggy and its notes are not as clear.  I color-code my highlights and "post-it" notes and can write additional notes in the margins (see below).  This spring Mendeley launched an app that means I can read papers luxuriously (or as luxuriously as one can read 10 journal articles in a sitting) on my tablet, highlighting, noting and tagging away.  
3. You can tag.  This helps me keep important points organized and allows me to collate all of the papers discussing a particular point with the click of a button.  
4. Mendeley has a social networking feature that lets you follow topics or authors.  This seems helpful, but I haven't explored this feature much yet.  I think it will become more and more important as time passes and more researchers join up.

Organize Citations

• Folders - I create a new folder for each paper I write.  If I'm working with someone else, such as my mentor, I can share the folder with them in a group (see below).  I suppose you could create folders by topic, but I use tags for that.  Maybe as I get deeper into my subject area I will switch, but for now - being in coursework - organizing by paper is easiest for me.  
• Groups - Groups help you collaborate.  You can share papers with anyone with a Mendeley account, including the rest of the folks on your team.  You can also publish a folder on a topic to the social network that Mendeley provides.  
• Tags - This is probably my favorite part of Mendeley.  I tag journal articles based on their key findings.  This way, when I'm writing I can pull up all the papers whose findings decribe the "gender pay gap," quickly review the paper and my notes on it, and add my thoughts into my writing.  This does, however, require you to remember to tag after you read each article, so that you pull up all the articles discussing that point.  But, once you make that contract for yourself, it works like a charm.  
• Linked PDFs - Like EndNote, Mendeley lets you link the PDF.  In fact, the easiest way to get the PDFs into the program is to download them and then just drag them onto the main page.  It will populate the meta-data (i.e. bibliographic information) for you.  
• Adding PDFs = Adding citations 
• You can add PDFs by just dragging the PDF onto the main window.  It will load the citation information.  
• You can "watch" a folder.  This feature lets Mendeley "watch" a folder on your computer/cloud.  When you sync, Mendeley will check to see if any new files were added to "watched" folders, and it will automatically bring those new files into Mendeley.  

Take Notes

• General Notes - You can write notes in the "notes" section.  I usually set a brief outline that would basically be the headings in a systematic review (e.g. sample, method, intervention, key findings, etc.) and copy that into each "notes" box.  This way I can quickly review the article's key points later without having to re-read too much.  
• Highlights (and color coding) - I color-code my highlighting so that I can find and generally interpret key notes quickly.  
• Yellow (default color) - general point I find interesting
• Red = Read - any authors or particular citations I want to read later
• Green = Gap in the literature
• Orange/ Gold = Goal - goal of the article and, subsequently, outcomes and key findings
• "Post-its"  - You can color-code the notes too if you have additional reactions to the points you highlight.  

Syncing

• Once you're done working on a device, sync.  Then the articles and notes will load to your online profile.  After that, you can just press sync on your other device (e.g. tablet) and ta-da all your new stuff is on this device too.  For example, if I run a search and load a bunch of new articles on my PC, I can sync on my PC, open my tablet, press sync, and then read the new articles on my tablet which is more ergonomic.  

Cite as You Go and Build Your Reference Pages

• Once you commit to Mendeley, you can activate the "cite-o-matic" (no really, that's what it's called) under the reference tab in word.  Then, as you type, you can just start typing the first few words of the citation, and it will complete the in-text citation.  When you're finished with your paper, you can click "insert bibliography" and it will make a bibliography based on the citations you've included.  

Better than Endnote

I like that you can use tags, that it's easily accessible, that the highlighting is less wonky, and that you can take in-text notes in a way that makes more sense to me.  But EndNote does have better search options from EndNote, in that you can search the library from EndNote.  I could never get this to work when I was off campus, so this was more trouble than it was worth for me.  But really, it comes down to personal preference.

Limitations

• Sometimes the citation gets loaded incorrectly, which means your citations and references will be wrong.  Solution: When you read the article, get in the habit of double-checking the citation information as far as accuracy and capitalization.  
• Some PDFs are not able to be highlighted or post-it-noted.  This seems to mostly be in the app, which is new, so maybe they are working on this bug.  I have not had this problem in the PC version.  

Self-Care Plan

Okay, so we've established that self-care is necessary to radical practice.  But how do you actually accomplish taking care of yourself with the amazing number of things we have to and want to do every day?

In my life, self-care was a joke for a long time.  As a young person growing up in an emotionally stressful home, self-care was in limited supply.  Most of the time I was helping others or staying busy enough that I didn't have to think.  So I lived on a spectrum from helping others to completing objective tasks, a spectrum of activities largely divorced from self-care.  This seems like it is a fairly common reality, particularly for women and/or people involved with caregiving.  Hence, self-care activities for the purpose of self-care alone - not for resume-building or because someone told you to or because someone required it - was not something I built into my personal habit arsenal.  I lived in this way through college.  And through my first years post-college.  Finally, I realized life was not going to slow down.  I wasn't going to "get there" - there being a fantasy land where I had a daily routine that had ample time for self-care.  Then a few things happened at once.

1. I realized I was planning for an emotional retirement that was likely to never occur.  
Suggestion: Accept that life is busy and fast because we live in a competitive capitalistic society.  If you are going to get self-care, you are going to have to prioritize it and carve time out to allow for it.  It's part of getting through this marathon in a healthy way.

2. My family and friends finally convinced me that I like self-care.
Suggestion: Try to listen to the people who love you when they say things that - if you are like I was - you hate.  Examples include, "don't work too hard," "you should go home," and "take a deep breath."  When I was a workaholic I interpreted these as being related to competition (i.e. they wanted me to stop working so I would be easier to beat) or that they just did not understand my work ethic (i.e. they couldn't understand me - adolescence, anyone?).  Eventually as I learned to trust, I believed them and I took a break.

3.  I realized that when I participated in self-care, I was way less anxious.  I could do my work with less stress and less fear of failure.  
Suggestion:  Try it.  See how you feel after taking a whole day or a whole weekend off.  Or taking off enough time that you feel like you can work again.

So clearly I had a battle even getting to the point that I was willing to admit that self-care was a real thing and was not going to prevent me from finishing all of my tasks.  Now I approach self-care like I approach most of my life as a budding social worker: through assessment, treatment planning, and progress assessment.

University of Buffalo has my favorite tools for making a self-care plan.  It takes into account the many facets of the individual: mind, spirit, body, work, emotions, and relationships.  It also helps you prepare for emergencies when your self-care bucket is empty and your stress bucket is over-flowing.  Check it out here: https://socialwork.buffalo.edu/resources/self-care-starter-kit.html.  

The only thing I've added is a worry/ re-frame t-chart.  Do you have worries that come up all the time and you find yourself and your friends/spouse/support system talking through a million times?  I do!  I'm trying to avoid this anxiety deja vu by writing out my worries and worst-case scenarios and then writing a response to myself to help me re-frame the situation.  Here's an example:

Worry: I will get a poor grade on this paper.  

Re-frame/ Response:  Number one: no one cares what grades you get anymore.  No one will ever see these grades.  Number two: you work your best when you are fearless.  Be fearless.  You might get a poor grade.  That is good practice for paper rejections.  Just write.  Believe what you've always believed - that you have important ideas that will help people and you need to get them out.  This paper is a small step on the road to being able to do that.  You can take the step, and you can miss a step and still get to the destination.  It will be okay.  Just write something.  

So yeah - a bit corny, but definitely what my husband would say if I asked him.  Which I have.  Many times.  And he's tired of repeating it.  So writing it down will help both of us.

Last step.  Share your plan.  Share it with your partners in life, so they can remind you about it when you are stressed or feeling guilty about taking a break.

Take care,
Kess