Our formal education tends to focus on scientific concepts rather than practical tools, which often leaves us to fend for ourselves in an imposing digital world. All too often we Google our way into deep rabbit holes searching for answers, and when the deadline looms we settle for inefficient patterns and practices that “just work”. This is a challenge we all face and can work together to overcome. This session draws inspiration from an informal lecture series in the Oceanography Department at Dalhousie University called “Methods in Ten Minutes” that provides a forum for graduate students to share tools and concepts that they rely on for their research. In this session I will outline some basic guiding principles for keeping projects organized, efficient, and reproducible as well as introduce various open source software tools that I and many of my peers have come to rely on.