Organization and Productivity
Smooth Science: Eight Helpful Tidbits for Making Science a Cakewalk
Whether you’re an entry tech, an optimistic grad student, or a seasoned post-doc, we’ve all managed to get into a rut with lab etiquette and how we “do” science. With spring-cleaning on everyone’s minds, here are a few reminders that may help you clean out the proverbial cobwebs and start afresh. 1. Label EVERYTHING Several…
Read More Top 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 More How 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 More Expert 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 More Science 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 More Seven 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 More Surviving 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 More 4 Ways You Can Improve Your Research Reproducibility
You will learn: 4 highly effective ways to improve your lab’s research reproducibility by using Labguru, including: Protocol versioning. Reagent descriptions. Specimen tracking. Experiment design. Summary: Recent studies indicate that at least 70% of certain types of research (particularly around life sciences) is not reproducible. Funders, reviewers, and researchers are increasingly demanding improved processes to…
Read More Common 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 More 20 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 More Making 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 More Spring 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 More How 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 More 6 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 More The A-Z List of Things that go “Missing” in the Lab
Here is a fun list of things that you are most likely to lose to light-fingered colleagues or nocturnal ghosts of academia. The emphasis here is on fun, so as disclaimers often go, if your experience proved somewhat different, this list “does not represent the actions of every individual or ghost who you might encounter…
Read More Damage 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 More Sharing and Transferring Gigabytes of Data
Great Scott! 1.21 gigabytes of data!!! The conundrum is not ‘Where can I store massive amounts of information’, but ‘How can I quickly share massive amounts of information all at once?!’ I’m certain this is a topic we have all wrestled with before, so here are 5 quick ways to send research data out to…
Read More Tips for Uncluttering your Email Box
In the hectic world we live in you may not be away from your computer for more than an hour and the emails pile up. Setting aside a couple of time blocks each day to spend answering emails and following some of the tips below will help keep on top of things. 1) Set up…
Read More Best 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 More 10 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…
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