Research can be as exciting and exhausting as climbing a mountain. In both cases, preparation will help you along the way. This highly interactive workshop aims to provide you with the knowledge and basic tools needed to plan & execute your journey in an efficient and useful way. Keeping your data organized, understandable, and safe are key components of your daily work. Furthermore, preparing your data according to best practices like the FAIR principles helps in publishing and collaboration. After an introduction of the stages research data goes through and the actions required to efficiently manage your results, we will explore best practices relevant to planning, structuring, storing, and publishing of research data. The IPK provides tools to support these efforts, and we will collect hands-on experience working with them. This 5-day workshop was developed and held at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) Gatersleben (https://www.ipk-gatersleben.de/en/) and thus contains specifics of their research data management environment.