Everyone needs a little pointless highly-satisfying task to do when you should be doing something else – I mean, something other than Facebook. For me, that’s Mendeley.
At first glance, it’s just a citation tool. Basically, you put all your journal articles, research papers, conference proceedings, book chapters, etc in there and hope that one day, when it comes time to use them in an article or essay, the software makes it easy to cite them.
I don’t know how anyone gets through any sort of degree these days without a citation manager of some sort. I don’t know how I got through my undergrad without one! And now, when I’m not even studying, I find myself curiously addicted to this citation software.
So what do I do, when I waste time on Mendeley? I organise. I update tags. I fix abstracts. I find full-text PDFs of the article. I find the author and follow them on the most appropriate social media.
Occasionally, I even read the articles.
Everyone needs a thing that distracts them for just a few minutes a day, something utterly mesmerising and mindless to take your mind off the task at hand. For some people, it’s colouring books. For others it’s puzzles.
For this nerd, it’s Mendeley.
