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Background: I'll start to write my (cumulative) dissertation in two months.

I'm currently struggeling to find a good technical solution to organize research-related thoughts for my dissertation. For each chapter, I currently have an individual Trello board with lists such as "ToDo", "Research Ideas", "References", "small thoughts / phrases / arguments for certain design choices". This seemed to work at the beginning, but now I have so many "small phrases" that I lost the overview of them.

Up until now when I was working on papers, I usually wrote all my thoughts into the corresponding sections of the papers. However, with my dissertation as a "larger paper", I don't think it's feasible to organize my thoughts this way.

How do you organize 100+ "small thoughts" about your research and still have a good overview? I know that I can use a physical notebook but I'd rather have an online solution that allows me to quickly reorganize my thoughts (which a notebook does not).

I know that Good practices for organizing notes is related but the answers were discussing online vs. offline and the general guideline was 'whatever helps you'.

InterestedUser
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    The problem is "whatever helps you" might be the best answer. – skymningen Apr 28 '17 at 12:09
  • @Saturnus: Yes, I already linked that article but the answers weren't discussing specific organization styles but rather online vs offline – InterestedUser Apr 28 '17 at 12:18
  • @skymningen: True. Nevertheless, I'd like to know how others organize their research thoughts since basically every researcher has to somehow manage them. We can convert his question into a community post if that's more suitable. – InterestedUser Apr 28 '17 at 12:19
  • Maybe notecards? I still use this system for certain things. The nice thing about notecards is that you can easily reorder them and you can easily discard no longer needed old ones or include new ones, and you still have the option of adding brief thoughts or references on the notecards. – Dave L Renfro Apr 28 '17 at 15:25
  • the general guideline was 'whatever helps you'. — Well, yes. That's also the correct answer here. – JeffE Apr 28 '17 at 21:14

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