2006-02-27

My quick Knowledge Work System

Recently, a dear friend of mine was having troubles starting off her PhD. It happens to the best people, as you surely know.

I gave a look at my informal knowledge working system and decided to present it to her, hoping to help her get off the working slump. Now I am going to post it here, on my blog. Please give a look at it and tell me what you think. The main design goal was simplicity - keep it simple! Computers are supposed to help, not get in the way of work...!


    
QuicKWS – A quick working Knowledge Working System

This document describes QuicKWS that enables the knowledge work necessary for working on PhD or similar thesis. The necessary tools are a Windows computer, Microsoft Office and CVS. You can use LaTeX as well, because it’s a standard tool for scientific work. The file store is organized in two zones, as follows:

ZONE 1 – EXPLORATION WORK (alias Dress Casual)

/Ideas

    /Calendar – write your working schedule and dead-lines


    /Logs – files for registering activities, ideas, etc. No concerns on formatting. Just place /dump your info here. Never delete anything from this, just add. After one week or one month, just extract the most useful contents to deliverables or to summary logs


ZONE 2 – DELIVERABLES (alias Dress Formal)

/Thesis


    /Subjects – place here documents written by you, with adequate source referencing


    /Chapters – same as subjects, but to be used later on, while filling up material for the thesis’s chapters


    /References – file store for all references used in the work


        /A


        ...

        /Z
            /Zorro D. Jackson P., 2005
            notes.doc – my notes on this reference
            paper.pdf / html / … - actual paper
            paper.bib – bibtex file describing the paper – for LaTeX users
            or the next two files for non-latex users:
            url.txt – text file whose contents are the reference URL
            desc.txt – short text description of contents (abstract)


/ThesisCVS – CVS repository for all files contained in /Thesis (but not /Ideas)

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