How These 5 Tools Transformed My PhD Life (And Can 10x Your Productivity Too)

3 minute read

Let me start with a question —
Have you ever felt like 24 hours just aren’t enough to juggle research papers, deadlines, notes, and emails?

Back in my PhD days, I did too.
I’d wake up with to-do lists that only got longer, not shorter. Notes were scattered, references went missing, and writing papers felt like pushing a boulder uphill.

Until one day, I stumbled upon a few tools — not recommended by a professor, not from any fancy productivity guru — but through pure trial, error, and late-night YouTube rabbit holes.

I made a short reel on it two years ago: Watch it here — but today, I’ll go deeper.

Because what these tools did was quietly change everything.

If you’re a student or researcher constantly asking,
“How do I become more productive?”
“How do I write better, manage references, or take better notes?”
— this is for you.

🔍 1. Note-Taking: Obsidian over Notion

Let’s be honest — Notion looks pretty. But in the middle of a research sprint, I needed more than just pretty.

Obsidian gave me speed, simplicity, and power.
I could link ideas like neurons in a brain, write distraction-free, and find anything in seconds.
It became my second brain — storing 6,000+ notes, all searchable, all connected.
Once I switched, I never looked back.

📚 2. Reference Management: Zotero over Mendeley

I used to dread bibliography formatting. Seriously.
Then Zotero entered.

It’s like having a personal librarian who organizes everything exactly how you want — APA, IEEE, you name it.
It even auto-updates PDFs and integrates with Overleaf.
Mendeley felt clunky in comparison. Zotero just worked.

Zotero is open-source, community-backed, and widely used by top academics. No hidden paywalls.

✍️ 3. Paper Writing: Overleaf over Word

MS Word? For scientific papers? Not anymore.

Overleaf is real-time LaTeX, with version control, collaboration, and auto-compiling.
No more broken formatting, no more lost figures.
I could invite my advisor to comment directly in the paper without emailing endless drafts.

If you write scientific papers and don’t use Overleaf yet, you’re missing out.

💡 4. Idea Capture: Google Keep over Obsidian

For spontaneous ideas while walking or during meetings, Keep wins.

It’s light, voice-enabled, syncs across devices, and works offline.
I dump ideas here and later process them into Obsidian.

🪄 Tiny habit, big payoff: Capture every thought. Don’t rely on memory.

🌀 5. Paraphrasing: ChatGPT over Quillbot

This is where AI shines brightest.

I used Quillbot for a while, but it often missed the tone.
ChatGPT? It understood context.
Whether I needed to simplify a technical sentence or rewrite it for clarity — it felt like having a co-writer who actually gets it.

📌 Bonus: It also helped me brainstorm titles, check tone, and even write rebuttal letters to reviewers.

Final Thoughts

These 5 tools didn’t just make me productive — they gave me clarity.
In the middle of thesis chaos, they gave me structure.
And when I finally completed my PhD, these tools were some of my best collaborators.

If you’re still relying only on traditional methods, stop.
Open your toolkit. Experiment. Evolve.

Because the right tools don’t just save time — they save your mind. 🧠

👋 About Me

Hi, I’m Shuvangkar Das, a power systems researcher with a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Clarkson University. I work at the intersection of power electronics, DER, IBR, and AI — building greener, smarter, and more stable grids. Currently, I’m a Research Scientist at EPRI (though everything I share here reflects my personal experience, not my employer’s views).

Over the years, I’ve worked on real-world projects involving large scale EMT simulation and firmware development for grid-forming and grid following inverter and reinforcement learning (RL). I also publish technical content and share hands-on insights with the goal of making complex ideas accessible to engineers and researchers.

📺 Subscribe to my YouTube channel, where I share tutorials, code walk-throughs, and research productivity tips.

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