I mentor thirteen trainees (not including the clinical residents and fellows). Between them they keep about fifteen manuscripts and abstracts moving at any one time, plus a rotating cast of grant and conference deadlines. For most of my career the thing holding all of that together was my memory…the memory of a busy trauma surgeon and entrepreneur, which reliably surfaces the author-verification form the morning after it was due.
I tried a variety of organization methods. Box folder, google drive, regular meetings with someone designated to update an excel sheet in real time. I pushed through willpower and a patching of tools for a decade and can report the results (pretty good actually! but messy). What worked was handing the whole thing to Claude and building something sensible to keep everything moving. Three tools wired together, and one agent that keeps them tidy. This article is how I put that together, and why I think Notion + Context + Claude Cowork is a scalable organization system for much more than just research lab. Very simply, this is “connectors” (the MCP in claude), your natural language and cadence of work to drive project management as well as accountability. It works and a host of other workflows. I still use google drive for file management, and once we move into patient health information there are other considerations. But this is a great loop system that scales to many work-streams.
Build the whole thing in twenty minutes
I turned this setup into a scroll-through tour with a stop for each piece, and the exact prompt to copy and paste at every one in a “scrollworld”. Would love people’s feedback on this format. You should be able to login with your gmail account if you are a subscriber.
