Timothy Berg is a full-time aircraft mechanic, a father with church responsibilities, and a full-time PhD student in church history at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. As a result, his dedicated desk time for research is virtually nonexistent. “I get very, very little time in my schedule where I can sit down in front of a computer,” he says. So nearly all of his serious academic work, including the reading behind his dissertation on the creation of the King James Bible, happens on the Logos mobile app, in windows as short as ten or fifteen minutes: a break at work, a lunch hour, standing in line.
In this interview, Tim walks through exactly how he makes that work.
A quick note before we get into it: some of the Logos links below are affiliate links. If you buy through them, Logos Coach may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only link to resources I’d point you to anyway.
Why this matters
It’s tempting to think of serious study, whether that’s patristics, historical theology, or original languages, as something that requires a desk, a stack of books, and an uninterrupted afternoon. For most of us, those afternoons are rare. What we actually have is a string of smaller windows scattered through the week, and whether those windows go to real study or to scrolling often comes down to whether our tools are ready to meet us there.
I used to commute from downtown Chicago out to Wheaton College Graduate School for my own Biblical Exegesis classes, and I’ll be honest: I wish I’d had this level of Logos capability back then. A commute like that is exactly the kind of window Tim’s workflow is built for.
Build a saved layout instead of starting from scratch every time
Tim’s core habit is the saved layout. When he’s working on a particular topic or paper, he opens every resource he needs for it, things like multiple editions of a text, dictionaries, and reader’s guides, arranges them the way he wants, and saves the whole arrangement under one name. It’s the mobile equivalent of spreading your books across a desk, except you don’t have to spread them out again next time. One example he showed: a layout built around the Aquinas Institute’s bilingual edition of the Summa Theologiae for a class assignment on the Summa: English on top, the Latin text linked beneath it, plus several supporting resources open alongside.
What success looks like: instead of hunting down and reopening five or six books every time you sit down to a topic, you tap one saved layout and you’re back exactly where you left off.
Use link sets and “follow only” so you don’t lose your place
The feature that makes a crowded layout usable is the link set, especially the “follow only” setting. Tim connects several resources so they scroll together, but sets everything except his primary text to follow only. That means he can flip through a parallel Latin text, Peter Kreeft’s annotated condensed edition, a reader’s guide, or Mortimer Adler’s heavily cross-referenced edition, all without ever losing his place in the base text he’s actually reading through. Only scrolling in that one primary window moves everyone else along with it.
It’s a small setting with an outsized effect. It lets you consult as many secondary resources as you want without the constant tax of re-finding your spot.
Let favorites hold your place, but rename them on desktop
For quickly returning to specific passages or entries, Tim uses mobile favorites. One catch he ran into: mobile favorites are automatically titled after the section they came from, which gets confusing fast if you’re saving dozens of entries from the same resource (he ran into exactly this saving entries from a Latin dictionary). Mobile doesn’t currently offer a way to rename a favorite from within the app itself, a limitation other Logos users have run into as well. Tim’s workaround: rename the favorites on desktop, then let sync carry the cleaner titles back to mobile. It takes a few extra minutes, but it’s the difference between fifty identically named entries and fifty you can actually find again.
Let notes write their own citations
Tim’s fastest research habit might be this one. When he needs to reference something from another resource, a Latin dictionary definition, for instance, he copies the relevant text and pastes it directly into a note attached to what he’s reading. Logos preserves the original formatting and automatically adds a footnote showing exactly where the material came from. No hand-typing a citation, no losing track of a source days later. He also uses a simple three-color highlight system: blue or gray for minor points, yellow for more important ones, and red for anything he knows he’ll need to revisit. That way his markup carries meaning at a glance.
A practical example
Across the interview, Tim moves fluidly between two very different bodies of literature using the same handful of habits: Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae for a seminar assignment, and patristic texts like Cyprian for his own historical-theology work. He mentioned discovering, only a couple of years into being a Logos user, “a wealth of patristic and medieval resources” bundled into larger packages that he didn’t know existed, resources like the Church Fathers Definitive Collection, which brings together hundreds of patristic works in one searchable library. Whether he’s comparing two editions of Cyprian or working through a dense question in the Summa, the same core moves apply: build the layout, link the supporting resources as follow-only, favorite what you’ll need again, and let your notes cite themselves.
If sermon prep is more your world than a dissertation, the same instincts show up in Pastor Tanner’s Logos workflow: build the setup once, then let it carry you week to week. And if it’s the research habits themselves you’re drawn to here, Mike Colburn’s approach to Logos AI and advanced search is a good next stop.
Try this on your next stretch of study
Pick whatever you’re currently reading for a sermon, a class, or your own study, and open every resource you’d normally want alongside it. Save that as one named layout. The next time you’ve only got ten minutes, open it and see how much further you get than you would have starting cold.
Recommended Logos Resources
Logos Mobile App: the free app this entire workflow runs on. Download for iOS or Android.
Aquinas Institute Opera Omnia Project: Summa Theologiae: the bilingual Latin and English edition used as the base text in Tim’s demonstrated layout.
A Summa of the Summa: Peter Kreeft’s condensed, heavily annotated edition, ideal as a follow-only linked resource.
Church Fathers Definitive Collection: the kind of patristics library Tim describes discovering, useful for anyone doing early-church research.