dissertation planning notion

A Guide to Dissertation Planning: Tips, Tools and Templates

Dissertations are a defining piece of academic research and writing for all students. To complete such a large research project while maintaining a good work-life balance, planning and organisation is essential. In this article, we’ll outline three categories for dissertation planning including project management, note-taking and information management, alongside tools and templates for planning and researching effectively.

For both undergraduates and postgraduates, a dissertation is an important piece of academic research and writing. A large research project often has many moving parts from managing information, meetings, and data to completing a lengthy write-up with drafts and edits. Although this can feel daunting, getting ahead with effective planning and organisation will make this process easier. By implementing project management techniques and tools, you can define a research and writing workflow that allows you to work systematically. This will enable you to engage in critical thinking and deep work, rather than worrying about organisation and deadlines. 

To get prepared, you can do two things: First, start your preliminary readings and research to define a topic and methodology.  You can do this in summer or during the first few weeks of university but the sooner, the better. This gives you time to discuss things with your supervisor, and really choose a topic of interest. Second, begin preparing the tools and techniques you’ll be using for your research and writing workflow. You can use the preliminary research phase to test these out, and see what works for you. 

Below, we’ll cover three key aspects to consider when managing your dissertation, alongside some digital tools for planning, research and writing. 

The 3 Categories of Dissertation Planning

Project Management and Planning 

Your dissertation is a project that requires both long and short-term planning. For long-term planning, roadmaps are useful to break your work down into sections, chapters or stages. This will give you a clear outline of the steps you need to work through to complete your dissertation in a timely manner. 

Most likely, your roadmap will be a mixture of the stages in your research project and the sections of your write-up. For example, stage 1 might be defined as preliminary research and proposal writing. While stage 3 might be completing your literature review, while collecting data. 

This roadmap can be supplemented by a timeline of deadlines, this is when those stages or chapters need to be completed by. Your timeline will inform your short-term plans, and define the tasks that need completing on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. This approach, using a roadmap and timeline, allows you to capture all the moving parts of your dissertation, and focus on small sub-sections at a time. A clear plan can make it easy to manage setbacks, such as data collection issues, or needing more time for editing. 

Note-taking 

Whether you use a notebook, or digital tool, it’s ideal to have a dedicated research space for taking general notes. This might include meeting notes from supervision, important information from informational dissertation lectures, or key reminders, ideas and thoughts. It can be your go-to place for miscellaneous to-do lists, or to map out your thought processes. It’s good to have something on hand that is easy to access, and keeps your notes together in one place. 

Beyond this, you’ll also need a dedicated space or system for literature and research notes. These notes are important for avoiding plagiarism, communicating your ideas, and connecting key findings together. A proper system or space can make it easier to manage this information, and find the appropriate reference material when writing. Within this system, you might also include templates or checklists, for example, a list of critical reading questions to work through when assessing a paper. 

Information Management 

It’s important to consider how you plan to organise your literature, important documents, and written work. Note-taking is a part of this, however, this goes a step further to carefully organise all aspects of your dissertation. For example, it’s ideal to keep track of your literature searches, the papers you’ve read, and their citations but also, your reading progress. Being able to keep track of how many passes a paper has been through, how relevant it is, or where it fits within your themes, or ideas, will provide a good foundation for writing a well-thought out dissertation. 

Likewise, editing is an important part of the write-up process. You’ll have multiple drafts, revisions and feedback to consider. It’s good to have some way of keeping track of all this, to ensure all changes and edits have been completed. You might also have checklists or procedures to follow when collecting data, or working through your research. A good information management process can reduce stress, making everything easy to access and keep track of, which then allows you to focus on getting the actual work complete. 

Digital Project Management and Research Tools for Dissertation Planning 

Trello is a project management tool that uses boards, lists and cards to help you manage all your tasks. In a board, you can create lists, and place cards within these lists. Cards contain a range of information such as notes, checklists, and due dates. Cards and lists can be used to implement a digital kanban board system , allowing you to move cards into a ‘to-do’, ‘in progress’ or ‘complete’ list. This gives a visual representation of your progress.

This is a flexible, easy to use and versatile tool that can help with project management of your dissertation. For example, cards and lists can be used to track your literature, each card can represent a paper and lists could be 1st pass, 2nd pass, or be divided into themes. Likewise, you can use this approach to organise the various chapters or stages of your dissertation, and break down tasks in a visual way. Students have used Trello to manage academic literature reviews , daily life as an academic , and collaborate with their supervisors for feedback and revisions on their write-up. 

Notion is an all-in-one note-taking and project management tool that is highly customisable. Using content blocks, pages, and databases, this tool allows you to build a workspace tailored to your needs. Databases are a key feature of Notion, this function allows you to organise and define pages using a range of properties such as tags, dates, numbers, categories and more. This database can then be displayed in a multitude of ways using different views, and filters. 

For example, you can create a table with each entry being a page of meeting notes with your supervisor, you can assign a date, person, and tags to each page. You can then filter this information by date, or view it in a board format. Likewise, you can use the calendar to add deadlines, within these deadlines, you can expand the page to add information, and switch to ‘timeline’ view . This is perfect for implementing project management techniques when planning your dissertation. 

Although this may sound complicated, there are many templates and resources to get you started . Notion is an ideal tool for covering all three aspects of dissertation planning from project and information management to note-taking of all kinds. Students have used Notion for literature reviews , thesis writing , long-term PhD planning , thesis management , and academic writing . The best part, these students not only share their systems, but have also created free templates to help you build your own system for research. 

Asana is a project management and to-do list tool that uses boards, lists, timelines and calendars. If you’re someone who prefers using lists to organise your life and projects, Asana is ideal for you. You can use this tool to manage deadlines, reading progress, or break down your work into projects and sub-tasks. Asana can integrate with your calendar, which is perfect if you already use other calendar tools for organisation. If something like Notion is too overwhelming, using a mixture of tools with different purposes can be a more comfortable approach. 

Genei is an AI-powered research tool for note-taking and literature management. Your research and reading material can be imported, and organised using projects and folders. For each file, genei produces an AI-powered summary, document outline, keyword list and overview. This tool also extracts key information such as tables, figures, and all the references mentioned. You can read through documents 70% faster but also, collect related articles by clicking on the items in the reference list. Genei can generate citations, and be used alongside other popular reference management tools, such as Zotero and Mendeley . 

This tool is ideal for navigating information management and literature notes for your dissertation. You can compile notes across single documents or folders of documents using the AI-generated summaries. These notes remain linked to their original source, which removes the need for you to keep track of this information. If you find it hard to reword content, there’s also summarising and paraphrasing tools to help get you started. Genei is a great tool to use alongside project management solutions, such as Trello and Asana, and note-taking tools like Notion. You can define an efficient research and writing workflow using these range of tools, and make it easier to stay on top of your dissertation. 

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How to Use Notion to Organize Your Research, Classes, and Grad School Life

2024 is the year of Notion ! This notetaking and organization app is the BEST I have found. Notion is a web and app-based tool that allows you to create aesthetic and functional d templates for almost anything! Using Notion for graduate school is a fantastic way to keep your work organized in one space. And it automatically backs up, so you don’t have to worry about losing files!

I have been using Notion since 2021 to organize my graduate school life. As a Ph.D. student, I had to keep track of my research, coursework, and personal life. I found it hard to manage these aspects of my life using a notes app, paper planner, notecards, and lab notebook. I found myself losing files and notes! It was frustrating having everything spread out across different formats. Especially with the pandemic, I didn’t always have access to my lab notebooks at the University while working from home. Today, I use Notion for everything!

Over the past few years, I’ve developed several Notion templates for grad school, and I figured I’d share them all with other grad students so they can get organized too! So, in this post, I’m sharing with you all the grad school Notion templates I developed. All the Notion templates are available through the She Sciences Gumroad and Etsy Shop . One thing to note: these grad student notion templates are geared more toward STEM graduate programs, so you’ll see more references to experiments in these templates. Even if you aren’t a STEM graduate student, you can easily translate these Notion templates into your field of research.

What is Notion?

If you’re new to Notion , welcome to the club! Notion is an amazing tool, I honestly wish I had found it earlier. So, let’s talk a bit about what Notion is and how it works!

Notion offers both free and premium accounts . The free account is sufficient for graduate students, but if you’re working with a larger team, upgrading your account is a great option because the other plans offer more team functionalities. But if you sign up with a student or educator email, you will be upgraded to the Plus Account for free!

Notion now offers Notion AI , a fantastic AI tool that will take your Notion templates to the next level. You can ask questions and use it for autofill, brainstorming, and drafting.

Simple Graduate Student Notion Dashboard

The first Notion template I made was a simple graduate student Notion dashboard . This template is great if you’re starting out with Notion and you want something simple to organize your stuff. On this grad student dashboard, there is a weekly schedule where you put tasks and deadlines for the week. This way, you have a simple week at a glance! Below the weekly schedule, there are several pages for Classes, Teaching, and Research. These pages contain templates that help you organize each area og grad school. Keep track of your classes using the Course Schedule and Class Notes pages. These templates contain easy-to-use tables that keep your work organized! Similarly, you can use the Course Schedule and Lesson Plan pages to manage your teaching.

Under research, you’ll find the research dashboard, a page for group meeting notes, and a customizable table for literature review! On this page, I have everything I need at a glance. There is a weekly schedule and to-do list, a page for your thesis or dissertation chapters, pages for each project, and a long-term Gantt chart. You can organize each chapter into a simple table on the chapters page. In this table, you can create pages for each chapter, organize them by topic, and add at-a-glance notes about the chapter goals. The long-term Gantt chart shows your long-term project planning, including when you want to focus on writing and working on each project.

Each project dashboard page contains pages for Experiments, Manuscript, Key References, and Ideas.

On the ideas page, you can keep track of all your ideas and notes.

You’ll find a table to organize your key references on the key references page.

The experiments and result page has a table for keeping track of your weekly tasks.

The manuscript page includes a task list, a list for keeping track of figures, and another project timeline where you can keep track of experiments and writing.

Research Lab Notebook Notion Template

Since research is the biggest aspect of grad school, I decided to develop the research lab notebook Notion template to focus on just research and experiments. This template is designed for project management and for logging daily research activities. It includes a database for daily entries and a functional task list to categorize and track your progress over time. You can easily create new tasks and entries with the click of a button on the homepage! There are databases as well for literature review and protocols that can be easily linked to projects and lab notebook entries.

Ph.D. Degree and Dissertation Planner

After I learned some of the more advanced features in Notion, like relation properties, I decided to develop a graduate student Notion template with a dissertation focus to automate your task lists for research, coursework, and other Ph.D. milestones. There are a lot of milestones in a Ph.D., from completing courses to conferences to qualifying exams to manuscripts. So, I wanted to integrate all of that together into a single Notion template, so I made the Ph.D. Degree and Dissertation Planner. This planner uses a task database linked to all the Ph.D. milestones. Each milestone has its own page and template in a database so you can track your progress for each item.

The one thing I loved about building this homepage was the automated lists for daily tasks and weekly tasks! I added progress bars throughout the template for visual progress tracking. Within the last year, Notion added automated buttons, which I love for quickly adding tasks and entries to the database!

Ultimate All-in-One Graduate Student Notion Template

The all-one-one graduate student Notion template is the largest and most functional template that I’ve been able to develop. The all-in-one graduate student Notion template integrates your personal and graduate school life. It combines everything from the Ph.D. degree and dissertation planner with personal life and professional development.

The homepage of the All-in-One graduate student Notion template is the “second brain” of the template. This template uses more advanced features in Notion, like automations, formulas, and relations, but these features are already set up for you, so all you have to do is get started! Here’s a glance at the pages that are included! This is where everything is available at a glance, and databases are automated to populate, making it easy for you to see what needs to be done that day.

The template includes over 20 pages for coursework, research, professional development, travel, finance, goal setting, and more! Here is a quick look as the many pages included in this Notion template!

Shop She Science’s Notion Templates

Simple dashboard.

She Science’s simplest template!

✓ Coursework page

✓ Project organizer

✓ Literature review tracker

✓ Meeting notes template

✓ At-a-glance homepage

Lab Notebook

Template for research project management

✓ Daily lab notebook database

✓ Automated task tracker

✓ Protocols manager

All pricing is in USD. Notion account required.

Ph.D. Planner

Track and organize your Ph.D. milestones, including coursework, research, and dissertation writing.

✓ Degree tracker

✓ Coursework manager

✓ Research project manager

✓ Task lists and agenda

✓ Meeting notes page

✓ Literature review page

All-in-One Grad Student

Ultimate template for your entire graduate school life, including research, course, personal life, and more!

✓ Everything in the Ph.D. Planner!

✓ Habit tracker

✓ Goal tracker

✓ Writing tracker

✓ Professional network manager

✓ 10+ personal life pages

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How to Use Notion as a Research Lab Notebook for Ph.D. Research

All-in-One Graduate Student Notion Template for Coursework, Research, and Personal Life

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Planning Notion templates

Welcome to our Notion Planning templates category! Here, you will find a selection of templates built by other designers that you can use to create and manage your plans and projects within Notion. These templates are designed to help you keep track of your tasks, deadlines, and other important information.

Our Notion Planning templates range from simple, one-page layouts to more comprehensive templates that include multiple pages and features. Whether you're a student looking to organize your assignments and exams, or a professional looking for a way to manage your projects and team, you'll find a template that fits your needs.

Each template in this category has been created by a fellow Notion user and has been tried and tested by others, so you can trust that they will help you create and maintain your plans and projects efficiently and effectively. Simply browse through the templates, select the one that best suits your needs, and start using it right away! With our Notion Planning templates, you can stay organized and on top of your tasks and deadlines.

• 301 Academic Skills Centre
• Study skills online

Dissertation planning

Information on how to plan and manage your dissertation project.

What is research?

A dissertation project is an opportunity to pursue your own ideas in an environment of relative intellectual freedom.

It also present a number of new challenges relating to the scale, scope and structure of a piece of work that is likely to be more substantial than any you have undertaken before.

These resources will help you to break the process down and explore ways to plan and structure your research and organise your written work.

A research-led university

Sheffield prides itself on being a  research-led university . Crucially, this means that teaching is informed by cutting-edge research in the academic field.

It also means that you are learning in an environment where you develop and use research skills as you progress. The most successful students tend to develop research skills early and use them consistently.

Research in higher education

Research sometimes just means finding out information about a topic. However, in the HE setting, specific understandings of 'research' carry a lot of weight.

The classic definition is that research leads to an original ' contribution to knowledge ' in a particular field of inquiry by defining an important question or problem and then answering or solving it in a systematic way.

You will build this contribution on the foundation of a robust structure of primary and secondary sources and evidence.

Differences across disciplines

Depending on the discipline you work in, there will be different ways of designing and articulating a research problem and different methods for answering these problems.

Not everything about research is 'original'. Sometimes the majority (or even all) of a research project will involve documenting or summarising information or ideas that are already available.

Not all research leads to answers. Sometimes research produces unusable results, or the inquiry leads to only more questions. Sometimes the originality of a research project is that it straddles more than one field of inquiry.

Some examples of approaches to research and what that contribution to knowledge might look like include:

• Explore an under-researched area
• Develop or test out a new methodology or technique
• Extend or develop a previous study
• Review the knowledge thus far in a specific field
• Makes connections between disciplines
• Replicate an existing study/approach in a different setting
• Apply a theoretical idea to a real world problem

This all adds up to the fact that research is a complicated topic that seems to mean a lot to academic experts but is very difficult to understand intimately when you are a novice.

As someone new to research, you will need to do some work to find out how research is conceived of and done in your discipline.

301 Recommends:

Our Dissertation Planning Essentials workshop will look at the initial stages and challenges of preparing for a large-scale dissertation project.

Our Dissertation Writing workshop will break down the process of writing a dissertation and explore approaches to voice and style to help develop a way of writing academically.

Our Creativity and Research interactive workshop looks at how to identify, develop and apply your creativity and innovation skills to the research process, whatever stage you're at. In our Creativity and Problem Solving interactive workshop you'll learn how to identify and develop your creativity and innovation skills, address problems and challenges, explore creative models and strategies, and look at how you can apply this to your academic work.

Our Part 1 workshop on Setting Research Priorities will help to break down the research process by identifying the key information that you need to have in place to develop your project. It will help you to prioritise key tasks and create a project workflow to set targets, track progress and reach key milestones. Part 2 will revisit that workflow to assess progress. It will encourage you to reflect on your project so far, identify opportunities for feedback and review your intermediate targets to ensure that you stay on track towards your deadline.

Explore this Illustrated Guide to a PhD  by Matt Might as a visualisation of research to help you identify how you can develop your research ideas.  

Our Video Dissemination workshop will give you an insight into the best practices for using video to disseminate research and communicate your ideas. It will look at styles, common communication techniques and the pedagogy of visual mediums, as well as top production tips for making your content engaging, informative and professional.

Research proposals

A research proposal often needs to encompass many things: it is part description, part analysis, part review, part guesswork, part advert, part CV.

Writing a research proposal that can achieve all these things is an important first step towards realising your project idea. Your research proposal will allow you to receive some early feedback on your ideas and will act as a guide as you plan and develop your project more fully.

But how can you explain what you hope to discover in the project before you’ve done the research?

There are a number of things that you can do to make sure that your research proposal is professional, realistic and relevant:

• Read around your topic of interest as much as possible. Getting a feel for what other kinds of research have been done will give you a much clearer idea of where your project might fit in. 
• Create a mind map of relevant topics to explore the links and connections between themes. Which branches of your mind map seem most promising as an area for enquiry?
• Be realistic. You may dream of making the next big breakthrough in the field, but this is probably unlikely! Set your self aims and objectives that are realistic within the timescales of your project. 
• Finally, make sure you follow your department guidelines and include everything that you need to in your proposal. 

301 Recommends: Research Project Design Template

Make a copy of this Research project design template (google doc) to capture the key information you need to complete your research proposal.

Research ethics

Whenever you undertake research, no matter what level you are working at, it is always important to consider the immediate and continued impact of your project.

All research should be designed to ensure that individuals involved in the project as subjects or participants are treated with respect and consideration. In practice, this means that:

• Participants have a right to full knowledge about the project and what its results will be used for.
• You should also be mindful of an individual's rights to privacy and confidentiality.
• You should consider the issue of data protection, how you will store project data safely and how long you will need to retain the data
• The physical, emotional and psychological well-being of participants and researchers should be prioritised in your research design.
• Environmental impacts of the research should be considered and mitigated where possible.
• Longer-term impacts, for example, if you are planning to publish findings from the project, should also be considered. 

It is perhaps easy to think that working directly with living participants raises the most pressing ethical questions.

However, you equally need to give very important consideration to the ethics of working in text-based subjects, especially when considering unpublished material (see also copyright).

Your department will have its own guidelines on the area of research ethics and you should certainly consult your tutor or supervisor as s/he will be able to give you detailed topic-specific guidance. More more guidance on ethics in research, visit Research Services Ethics and Integrity pages here . 

Project management

The key to completing a research project successfully is to invest time in planning and organising your project.

A student research project, whether a dissertation or a research placement, will usually involve tight timescales and deadlines. Given the wealth of tasks involved in a typical dissertation project, this can seriously limit the time available for actual data collection or research. 

Setting yourself clear and achievable aims and objectives will help to ensure that the project is manageable within the timeframe available.

As an early stage of the planning process, have a go at breaking your project down into its constituent parts: i.e. all of the tasks that you will need to complete between now and the deadline. How long will each of them take? For example:

Every project will have its own specific tasks, but breaking them down in this way will allow you to start planning ahead, adding milestones to your calendar and chipping away at the project task by task. 

301 Recommends: Trello

Trello is an online planning tool that allows you to create a project workflow. It is a simple and accessible tool that allows you to set yourself deadlines, colour code tasks and share your project plan with collaborators. View our example Dissertation Planning Trello board here and some guidance for students on using Trello (Linked In Learning) .

Working with your supervisor

Your supervisor will be your first point of contact for advice on your project and to help you to resolve issues arising. 

Remember, your supervisor will have a busy schedule and may be supervising several students at once. Although they will do their best to support you, they may not be able to get back to you right away and may be limited in their availability to meet you. 

There are a number of things that you can do to make the most out of the relationship. Some strategies to consider include:

• Share plans/ideas/work-in-progress with your supervisor early 
• Plan for meetings, sketch out an informal agenda 
• Write down your main questions before the meeting. Don’t leave without answers!
• Be receptive to feedback and criticism
• Take notes/record the meeting on a smartphone with your supervisor’s permission!)

301 recommends: Supervisor and supervisee relationships interactive digital workshop

This interactive resource will help you to develop a positive and productive working relationship with your supervisor. 

Top Tips and resources

• Read other dissertations from students in your department/discipline to get an idea of how similar projects are organised and presented. 
• Break your project down into its constituent parts and treat each chapter as an essay in its own right.
• Choose a topic that interests you and will sustain your interest, not just for a few days, but for a few months!
• Write up as you go along - writing can and should be part of all stages of the diissertation planning and developing process. 
• Keep good records – don’t throw anything out!
• If in doubt, talk to your supervisor.

Internal resources

• Library -  Research and Critical Thinking Resources
• Library –  Digital Skills for Dissertations : Information, resources and training on developing your dissertation projects, including finding and referencing sources, your literature review and creating and using images and infographics.
• ELTC -  Writing Advisory Service
• 301 -  Dissertation Essentials lecture recording
• 301 -  Dissertation Writing lecture recording

External resources

• The Theis Whisperer -  Writing Blog
• Gradhacker -  When it comes to dissertations, done is best

Related information

Scientific writing and lab reports

Proofreading

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