Workflows: Truly Welcoming Yourself to Graduate School
Introduction: Owning the Path I Took
Maybe I should have done a Master’s first. Maybe I should’ve taken a year off. Maybe I should have chased a higher-paying career in translation or PR. But in fall 2020, I entered my third year in the History Ph.D. program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, working with Professor Joshua Cole, author of Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria.
That same fall marked what graduate students often call “hell year”—the year of preliminary exams.
At Michigan, each doctoral student crafts three reading lists—each tied to a historical “field”—with anywhere from 100 to 800 texts apiece. A fourth field can be “coursed off” by completing two graduate seminars instead of sitting for an exam.
Here were my fields:
Modern European History (main field)
Early Modern European History (distribution field)
Global Comparative Race and Migration (third field)
I coursed off my fourth field in Critical and Queer Theory, with an emphasis on Michel Foucault.
The Reality Check: Fear, Anxiety, and Orientation
My first visit to Ann Arbor was for the admitted students’ weekend in March 2018. The department flew me out, booked a car service, and put me up in a historic hotel. After meeting my future advisor and a few faculty members, I was sold. But when I met fellow admits and older grad students, I also felt my first wave of panic:
Would I make friends? Could I survive seven years of this? What about depression, anxiety, and burnout?
I moved to Ann Arbor in August with my dad’s help. I got an apartment, took multiple trips to Ikea, and shipped my books cross-country in an absurdly expensive moving pod. I want to be transparent: I couldn’t have done any of it without my parents’ support—emotional, financial, and physical.
Then classes began. And with them, came the tidal wave of names, books, theories, expectations. I had read some critical theory—Foucault, Lacan—and some historiography of the French Revolution. But I had no grounding in E.P. Thompson, Fernand Braudel, A.J.P. Taylor, or Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie.
I was drowning.
Workflow as Survival Strategy
It quickly became clear: I didn’t just need to read more—I needed to manage the flood of information coming at me.
I needed a workflow.
The systems I relied on in college—and even high school—came back into play. The most important tool? Evernote. Its companion app, Scannable, lets me scan handwritten notes and make them searchable. I jot ideas on yellow legal pads, scan them, and file them in designated notebooks. Each course or topic gets its own notebook.
It’s not glamorous, but it works.
Why Workflow Matters (and Not Just for Notes)
Graduate school is already disorienting. A messy workflow only compounds the chaos. Poor information management doesn’t mean you’ll do bad work—but it does mean you’ll waste time, lose resources, and feel constantly behind.
A clear system gives you margin—to rest, to reflect, to breathe.
So here’s my core argument:
If you want to survive graduate school—and possibly even enjoy it—you need to be deliberate about how you manage information, tasks, and time.
Not because it makes you a productivity guru, but because it makes you less anxious, more present, and more able to focus on the actual thinking part of academic work.
My Stack: Tools that Keep Me Grounded
These are the tools I use consistently. Feel free to adapt them to your own habits:
📆 Calendar: iCal (or Google Calendar) to track classes, meetings, deadlines
✅ Task Management: Things 3 (or Todoist) for daily and long-term tasks
📚 Citation Management: Zotero and EndNote to log references and notes
📁 File Storage: Dropbox for PDFs, essays, syllabi—organized by academic year
🧠 Note-Taking: Evernote for reading notes, fleeting thoughts, meeting recaps
Every time a professor or colleague casually mentions a book or article, I log it. When I skim a text, I record the date and a brief reaction. These habits pay off big time during exam prep.
Information Architecture: Thinking in Folders
Your system is only as good as its architecture.
My Dropbox starts with a top-level folder called School Work. Inside are “child” folders organized by year. There’s also a Miscellaneous folder for files that haven’t yet found a home. It’s simple, but effective.
Once this structure is in place, I don’t waste energy deciding where something goes. It just goes there. Same for Evernote notebooks. Every class has a home. Every thought has a place to land.
When you build systems that work for you, you protect your working memory for the real intellectual labor—reading, writing, making connections.
The Takeaway: Grad School Is Hard Enough Without Chaos
Let’s be honest: grad school is already hard. The least you can do for yourself is eliminate chaos where you can.
A clear workflow won’t cure imposter syndrome or make archival research less overwhelming. But it will keep you organized enough to stay afloat. That means fewer missed deadlines, fewer all-nighters, and fewer moments of spiraling over a misplaced PDF.
Being “welcomed” to graduate school isn’t about orientation packets or campus tours. It’s about reaching the moment when you start taking your work—and your mental bandwidth—seriously.
Only then can you begin.
Substantial revision: March 25, 2025
