Methods to increase individual productivity in the lab are dear to the hearts of many regular nodalpoint readers (remember: You should be working). Right now you probably should be preparing a manuscript, writing code, reading papers, preparing lecture notes, doing experiments and many other tasks that will increase your scientific productivity. As scientists we don't always have the luxury of completing well defined tasks. After all, science is the business of discovering new knowledge and is far from being a linear process. So my question to nodalpoint readers is: How do you get things done in the lab ? Todo lists, organizers, outliners, PDAs, post-it notes, mental check lists ? Read on for more about my experiences with getting things done in the lab...
I became aware of the "Getting things done" meme after reading about Danny O'Brien's life hacks, which was a presentation at the O'Reilly emerging tech conference about how highly productive hackers manage their tasks (getting things done for nerds). The answer to this seemed to be having many terminals open on the desktop and a single text file with a list of things to do. Some time later the book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen came to my attention. I haven't read the book yet, but I've been following the cult of "getting things done" on the web site 43folders. The 43 folders article Getting started with Getting Things Done is a nice introduction to the methods in the book.
What I am curious about is whether these kinds of productivity methods can be applied to the scientific laboratory, given that the nature of scientific discovery is non-linear. Or maybe my assumption of non-linearity is incorrect, or more to the point miss-applied. While the overall nature of scientific discovery might be non-linear the tasks that need to be completed on the way to your next big discovery often are. For example a single experiment, analysis or coding task is often a well defined step by step process. So back to the original question: How do we get things done in the lab ?
I have experimented with various methods for increasing my productivity: disconnecting the Internet, using paper based organizers, extensive lists of things to do kept in loose leaf notebooks, outliner software, to do list programs, iCal and many others. What I have settled on is a mental check list (the big picture) and post-it notes (the small picture). However I don't just write everything down I need to do on post-it notes and have my desk covered in them. The way I use post it notes is to every day write down no more thank five atomic tasks on a single post-it (by that I mean tasks that can I reasonably expect to complete within a day). I then proceed in no particular order to complete these five tasks. Often I don't complete all five, in which case they are carried over to the next day. Why five ? I vaguely remember reading some where that five tasks per day is the optimal number of things that we (most people) can achieve in a give day. I admit the system is far from optimal: for example it doesn't help me deal with distractions.
Anther interesting example of scientific organization, which I will call Darwin's 1/3 rule, came about from reading how Charles Darwin organized his day: he split each day into thirds. A third of each day was devoted to reading, then writing and experimenting. This won't help you "get things done" but sectioning your day into activities that are essential for scientists may help. So now I'd like to hear about your methods ? Electronic PDA or hipster PDA ?
Comments
It has been interesting to no
It has been interesting to note in the replies how may of our solutions seem to converge when talking about managing atomic tasks etc. There also seems to be a general agreement on the difficulty of scientific project management and the "big picture". I'll try to write up a summary of these replies over the weekend... don't hold your breath though :)
Mostly mental notes
I have tried one or two project management tools but I end up always letting it go. It takes to much effort for me to keep it up to date. My basic method to keep track of projects is by folder structure. The root of the structure is projects and inside I have a database folder with all relevant local copy of data like, domain data, protein interaction data , etc. Then I have some species folders with genome and particular species specific data than I'm interested in and finally more dynamic and particular project folders. I tend to copy and paste a lot of code (I always say to myself I should package the perl code :) so I keep a folder for "trash" code that might be useful in the future. On a related note I have been using the google desktop search to look for perl syntax. When I remember I did something like this before but don't remember how or where I just google for it.
The first thing I do every day is check pubcrawler and the e-content alerts. I have no particular routine for when to read the accumulated literature I filter every morning but I'm thinking of reserving a day of the week for reading/thinking/planning. Wednesday actually sounds like a good suggestion.
I deal with the short term goals with mental notes and post-its. Every-time I have to give a group seminar (once every 3 to 4 months) I force myself to put my current work in the context of my PhD. What are the goals, what have I accomplished, where am I headed. This has so far kept my from wondering too far off topic.
One thing that has been a bit hard is multiple project management. How many projects to manage at the same time ? When to dedicate full attention to a project?
My best guess right know is , I juggle three ideas at any given time and once I see a promising result I focus on this until I trash it (most likely:) or turn it into a paper.
My few thoughts
While the overall nature of scientific discovery might be non-linear the tasks that need to be completed on the way to your next big discovery often are. For example a single experiment, analysis or coding task is often a well defined step by step process.
I agree - I don't think "non-linear" is the problem here. A scientific project, be it lab-based or computational, has a goal and a series of stepwise tasks. We may change our mind along the way about the best way to perform the tasks, we may get odd results or crap results...or no results, but we are trying to move in a specific direction. I think the distinguishing feature of "a scientist's working week" is that we have a lot of autonomy concerning what we do on any given day, how long to spend on it and what order to do things in. This is of course a good thing, but it requires self-discipline and organisation, especially when working on multiple projects.
FWIW, here are a few things that I have tried.
I used to think that it was possible to spend too much time on being organised and not enough on the actual project, but now I have a few working systems, I get a lot of value from them.
So Ubuntu - I must have had a bad experience (I tried out a Live CD a while ago which just kernel-panicked on boot). May give it another go if it's as good as they say, but it'd take a lot to get me off Debian.
directory structures
The standardisation of directory structure is a big plus. We tend to do broadly similar things on each project anyway, so a standard makes life easier. It also means you can script new project setup.
I still think that the key is discipline, though. The best system in the world is useless if you don't use it. And that's hard to maintain.
Tools
I've tried quite a large selection of systems/tools to organise myself. I generally find that desktop/handheld electronics are inefficient. You can't sketch, doodle, backreference easily etc. Outliners are worse than useless for me, since I wind up worrying about the logic of the sequence of ideas too much.
One thing I find invaluable is logging interactive sessions: I generally use R for exploratory analysis, and quickly hack up stuff to see what it looks like. Forcing myself to keep an Sweave-based log suddenly makes backtracking/note taking/report generation much easier.
I like the hipster PDA. Post-its get lost too easily, and are too easy to ignore. ToDo files can be useful for each project, but maintenance is actually rather high. I'm also wary of relying too much on one system without which I am stuck, and which may not be accessible at all times, such as groupware suites (egroupware, phpgroupware). Very cute, and particularly useful if an entire group uses them.
I also keep two notebooks, one for notes and the other for literature summaries. This is, again, a suboptimal solution, particularly wrt searching entries. I have in the past used my personal blog as a literature notebook, and probably will again once I migrate from MT to WordPress (all I'll say is comment spam). As for notes, I think it's notebooks for now...
Which brings me to (yet another) point: prior invention claims. Although this may be less of an issue in basic science/academia, it's advantageous to have incontrovertible proof of when you did an experiment, had a thought, or came up with an analysis framework. You could use discrete, time-stamped files for things, but it's probably safer to have a signed, dated hard copy in your own handwriting, counter-signed by someone if you're paranoid. Plagiarism and independent invention then becomes easy to disentangle - remember the story at the ASCB meeting in 2003 when a competitor read methods off a poster straight back to his lab (sub only)?.
Great minds think alike
This is something I have been thinking about for a while, although I have yet to find a complete, integrated solution. To me there seem to be two classes of principles: the generally applicable ones, and the ones unique to highly non-linear, creative processes like design, data analysis, etc.
First off, do an experiment. Use a stopwatch to time the amount of time you actually spend working. Stop the counter every time you check your email, surf the web, stare blankly at the screen etc. [If you are a serious geek, hack something up that measures the focus time of various windows/apps, and compile stats.] Assuming you are human, and are having a normal day, you'll find that around 15-20% of your time is devoted to actual work. Think about that. Think about it hard. We all know that time spent at work only poorly correlates with amount of work done. But time spent working...
I've tried most of the tracking/organisation solutions Greg mentioned, and quite frankly, I think we're all barking up the wrong tree. An isolated gizmo doesn't boost productivity, at least not in the long run. The mainenance required becomes so high that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics kicks in, and the whole effort goes to hell in a handbasket.
The point I think we miss very often is that we tend to organise at the wrong level. Let's face it, at any given time we tend to have more than one project on the boil, with a few pipedreams thrown in. I think that's where the problem starts. If you have, for example, five tasks from three different projects to complete in one day, you've spent only relatively little time per project. You don't have time to get back into the groove, to get all those little insights that bubble up every now and then - or at least I don't. YMMV.
So I suggest the following: use your concept of the work week when planning small scale. Block out regular times when you do things: literature surfing late in the week when Nature and Science come out; wednesday afternoon is reserved for "thinking", so you can decide what in particular you are going to read later that week; et.c. Leave yourself some leeway in when to do things, provided they get done. Plan some time for distractions: news/surfing/social mail is during your lunch hour, or immediately after with coffee; if you get other people doing it, it's also the dedicated time for interacting with your group.
The week format also lends itself to target setting, so you can rapidly block out the immediate future when you're medium-term planning or wondering if you can take on something new.
As always, YMMV.
[I'll add another comment about tools and solutions.]
getting things done
I'm reading the David Allen book right now and I'm finding it useful, and interesting as the type of system he proposes is one that I've gradually been evolving into in the last year or so as I've become the guy in the bioinformatics lab who picks up all the little stuff that needs doing.
I have a big todo list at the bottom of a daily log that I periodically check into cvs.
Anything I need to do gets thrown onto the todo list which I review and rationalize every week or so.
Everything that has been done goes onto the daily log, useful for monthly status reports.
It has made sure that things don't get forgotten, which used to happens a lot, and it is at a level of semi-organization with which I am comfortable. I can search for terms (vi: /search ) if I need to.
I'm only halfway there:
I have yet to properly integrate this into a daily calendar for time dependent events and I need a clearer mechanism for project management, dealing with longer term stuff with lots of depedencies. Dealing with delegated tasks is something I need figure out as well.
It's a fine balance: not having too many or too few processes and categories and doing just enough and not too much.
Instead of adding to the stor
Instead of adding to the story I'll add notes as comments. First: Getting Things Done with Your Mac, a guide to productivity tools on OS X. And of course: Personal productivity in Linux. I couldn't agree more with the first point on the Linux article. Ubuntu wins, no contest for my prefered Linux desktop distro.