Organization and Productivity
Creativity in Science: How a Good Imagination Can Help Your Research
It pays dividends to think creatively about your research. Here are 8 tips to supercharge creativity in science and ensure a great environment to help your imagination flourish.
Read MoreSimplicity in Science: How to Increase your Research Effectiveness by Doing Less
Discover how embracing simplicity in science can make you a more effective researcher while reducing your workload.
Read More8 Steps to More Successful Experiments
Performing successful experiments is a crucial skill for scientists. We’ve rounded up our top tips to help you achieve perfect procedures!
Read More10 Tips For Organizing Your Lab Book
It’s easy to let organizing your lab book slide down your list of priorities. Read our guide to easy ways to keep your lab book up to date and organized.
Read MoreScience Housekeeping Tasks to Tackle When You Aren’t in the Lab
Working away from the bench doesn’t mean your research has to suffer. Read more on how to take advantage of time away from the lab so you can return better than ever.
Read MoreThe Tidy Lab: An In-Depth Guide
Want to organize and tidy your lab? Read this detailed guide to a clutter-free and stress-free lab.
Read MoreHow to Prepare for Working From Home as a Research Scientist
Are you facing working from home? Find out how to prepare and stay productive.
Read MoreShare Your Samples at a Reagent Repository
Have you got a plasmid that others are begging to use? Perhaps your cell line is in high demand? We’ll show how using a repository can take the hassle out of sharing your reagents.
Read More10 Ideas for Researchers Working from Home
Working from home but don’t have a garage lab? We’ve got 10 ideas to keep you productive while you’re working away from the bench.
Read MoreHow to Share Your Lab Protocols and Why It Benefits You
Reproducibility is a cornerstone of scientific research and your results need to be reproducible not only by yourself but also by others, both in and outside of your laboratory. This reproducibility is key for validation of your results as well as to further expand on the knowledge gained during the experiment. In order to accurately…
Read MoreSimple Tips for a Clean(-ish) Lab Drawer
Picture it: 6:00 pm on a Friday night. You have one or more experiments running. Maybe you’re doing a western blot, or following a staining protocol for an immunohistochemistry experiment, or just labeling tubes. But rather than working on active experiments, you’re helplessly searching through the lab drawer for that one pair of forceps, that…
Read MoreHow to Cope With Overwhelm in the Lab: Taming Your Inbox
Look around you in your lab, your institution, and even in the world in general and you’ll see how much we all gravitate towards stress and overwhelm. Stress is just the workplace norm. Overwhelm means you are working “hard enough”. Being so occupied that you are frantically buzzing around from one task to another means…
Read MoreNeed a Few More Hours in the Day? Here Are Some Timesaving Tips
Are you constantly looking for ways to squeeze more lab hours out of the day? Here are some timesaving tips that can help. Figure out Where Your Time Goes Not sure where you are losing those valuable hours? Use a website like Toggl to help you keep track of your time. This will make it…
Read MoreDon’t Be Discouraged in a Lab with Minimal Resources
Here are some tips for working in a lab that is run on a really strict budget: no kits, no technicians, no media kitchen, or glassware washing service.
Read MorePrioritize Your Way to Success: a 4-Step Guide
So you just got out of your adviser’s office, feeling inspired, you get to your desk and look at the 27 new things added to your never-ending to-do list. You may feel overwhelmed, like you will never get all of this done; and that is true, you never will. The question is how do you…
Read MoreWhy You Should Dedicate Time to Write Detailed Protocols
During my first year as a graduate student, one of the earliest pieces of advice that I received from a senior student in the lab was to keep detailed protocols. In fact, she had a folder of her own protocols, all of them extremely detailed and riddled with notes. When she showed me how to…
Read MoreFive Tips to Increase Your Lab Efficiency
Starting a PhD program is both an exciting time as well and a challenging one… One of the main things that keeps most PhD students up nights, is rethinking their steps in the lab during the day. Did I do that one thing I may not have? Is that one reagent back in the fridge?…
Read MoreHow to Effectively Organize a Research Lab
An academic lab is a unique working environment. Lab members are expected to take responsibility for their own research projects and perform the work quickly and efficiently. However, unlike an industrial or corporate setting, there are often no clearly defined management structures. This means that when it comes to communal equipment, reagents and resources, individual…
Read MoreHow to Increase Your Productivity in the Lab
Lab work, as we are all aware, comes with many pressures: one of which is productivity. You want to generate as much quality data as possible to meet publication deadlines or perhaps the elusive thesis. Sometimes it may feel like hours spent in the lab don’t match the amount of data produced: for some this…
Read MoreExpert Tips on Managing Your Data
After ten years of postdoctoral research there is one important piece of advice I would give to anyone embarking on a research career: Spend as much time managing your data as you do generating it Take time at the beginning of each project to organize how you will record what you are doing day-to-day. The…
Read MoreSmooth Science: Eight Helpful Tidbits for Making Science a Cakewalk
Stuck in a rut? Here are some useful nuggets you could implement in your day-to-day science life.
Read MoreTop Tips to Keeping Your Logbook in Shipshape
Unless you are one of those rare breeds that do organization naturally, setting a system in place to archive your experiments takes practice and perseverance. It’s hard to imagine when you are doing an experiment for the 100th time that you will ever forget how to do it; but a year down the line, when…
Read MoreScience as Sport? Improve Your Work by Changing Your Perspective
“You think you know, but you don’t know and you never will, okay?” was the response an irate Jim Mora, head coach of the New Orleans Saints, gave to an unwitting journalist questioning his management – his point being that unless you’ve actually been in a professional sports team, you will never know what it’s…
Read MoreSeven Tips for Working From Home Successfully
You are a scientist. You run experiments in the lab, but also spend a lot of time analyzing data, writing, doing literature searches, writing, reading and did I say writing? The good news: You can do some of your work from home. The bad news: You can do some of your work from home. Working…
Read MoreSurviving Lab Life After Having Kids
Having kids changes your life. I should know, I have 5 little F1’s running around. Your life is thrown into chaos the minute you hear that first cry. And it isn’t only your personal life that changes. Eventually you have to figure out how to fold your new parenting responsibilities into your lab life.…
Read MoreCommon New Year’s Resolutions for Scientists (and how to keep them)
A new year means new resolutions and a chance to improve ourselves. All too often, however, these changes last only a few weeks before we slip back into old ways. Why not make 2015 different and make a change that sticks? These changes don’t have to be huge, and often it’s the small changes that…
Read More20 Ways to Increase your Productivity
No matter how efficient you are, it’s always possible to improve your productivity and improving your productivity means that you get more of the rewards you are trying to obtain: results, publications… or dare I say it, money. Here are 20 ways to improve your productivity. Some are focussed toward improving the productivity of bench…
Read MoreMaking The Most Out Of Your Commute To The Lab
Power nap anyone? Depending on how long your commute is, and what type of transport you use, you could make your commute useful. If you are taking public transport, you can use that time to answer those emails you don’t have time to get to at the office/lab, or to catch up on reading some…
Read MoreSpring Cleaning in the Lab – How not to Have Skeletons in your Lab Closet
Most of us hate cleaning and are often hard pressed to find time to clean our homes, never mind our laboratory space. However, an annual spring clean and maintenance of a regular cleaning rota/regime will contribute to an efficient, organized and harmonious lab environment. This is increasingly important in communal lab spaces where multiple staff…
Read MoreHow to Stay Organized in the Lab
Over the years, I have noticed that laboratory environments are just as fragile and sensitive as the experiments performed within. If permitted, the lab can deteriorate into a chaotic mess within only a few days. That is why it is crucial to establish an organizational system in the lab. Here are a few of my…
Read More6 Ways to Maximize the Lifetime of Your Reagents
Reagents are expensive and are a significant cost to your lab. You know what to do to keep others from stealing your reagents. But contamination, improper storage and “lost” batches will all eat into your stock of reagents, bump up your consumables costs and waste your precious time. Unless you take steps to prevent them, that…
Read MoreDamage control: One thing you must always to do ensure your data is reliable
Whenever you make up a solution or use a purchased reagent in the lab, you trust the work of a whole army of people and equipment. If any one of those links in the chain has a technical problem or makes a mistake, then your reagent might turn out to be faulty. And that can…
Read MoreBest Practice for Cataloging Your Samples
The correct documentation and storage of your laboratory samples may be a tedious process, but it will make your life a lot easier in the long run. The last thing any scientist wants when trying to complete a key last experiment for a publication is not being able to find or identify a critical sample.…
Read More10 Commonly Broken Good Laboratory Practices
What comes to mind when you think of good laboratory practices? To many, good laboratory practices describes the best conduct while working at the bench. The laboratory is a complex environment and understanding how small, seemingly innocuous, actions can have such a huge impact on the outcome of an experiment will help you to ensure…
Read MoreHow to Keep Track of Lab Orders
How often have you torn apart the lab looking for the reagent you need right now for some thawing samples? That reagent which you (possibly) ordered a week ago and which (maybe) came in yesterday? If your answer isn’t “just once in my entire career,” please read on! I will outline four steps to setup…
Read MoreTop 10 Most Hated Lab Tasks
Following closely on the heels of Cristy’s article “How to Clean a Waterbath”, I’d like to take a moment to rant about a few other hated (and carefully avoided) lab tasks. Here are my top ten LEAST favorite things to do in the lab: Cleaning out the vacuum trap – truly gag-worthy…you never know what…
Read MoreSuperstitions And Habits At The Bench: Sensible, Or Just A Little Bit Odd?
Everybody is different when it comes to how they like to run their work space. Some people just find a space in the lab and work wherever there’s room, sharing their tips and pipettes, while others like to have a designated area to do their lab work in, with their own equipment. Personally, I much…
Read MoreMaking a List, Checking it Twice: 5 End-of-the-year Lab Tasks
A lot of effort is spent on running experiments…and occasionally it can feel like an almost equal amount of effort is spent on administrative tasks! Policy compliance is important for keeping everyone in the lab safe, but it can be difficult to keep track of it all when your primary duties are at the bench.…
Read MoreWho Else Wants to Save Money on Lab Supplies?
Everyone loves a bargain! These days, more and more labs need to stretch every dollar as far as it will go. So how do you keep your lab well-supplied on a tight budget? To get a better deal on products you might choose to shop around, buy in bulk or haggle with vendors. However, if…
Read MoreMake Your Excel Worksheets Database Ready
In a previous article (Tips for Constructing Lab Databases in Excel by Emily Crow), BitesizeBio readers began a brief, but spirited commentary on the application of using true databases (MySQL, Access, etc.) versus Excel “databases”. While Excel can be quite useful to organize information (for example, an inventory of reagents, plasmids, laboratory items – even…
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