Organizing your time

Electronic lab book

Modern scientists must use an electronic lab notebook. These Ten Simple Rules for Lab Notebooks give a good account of why.

I use Evernote; alternatives are Notion, OneNote. labarchives is better for science (great versioning) but misses many other features.

Much of being a creative scientist is managing time, and part of making effective use of time is keeping a comprehensive log of experiments, results, research meetings, seminar notes, general vague thoughts about research, etc. Electronic notebooks keep this information searchable, and allow you to look over previous results and reproduce them.

Some tips:

  • Date every entry.
  • Copy and paste outputs of your analysis or code to keep a record of your research outputs as you produce them. Easy as a screenshot (on Mac: cmd-cntrl-shift-4 and then paste cmd-v).
  • Copy the code of the functions and their inputs that you use to generate your outputs, to allow you to reproduce what you’ve done. Works best with version control.
  • Tagging notes allows you to prioritize your time between tasks across multiple projects that require attention. I use 1-Now, 2-Next, 3-Soon.

Keeping track of your projects

  • Trello is good for keeping track of multiple tasks. I keep a main Trello board of all scientific projects I’m working on, organized across boards like: backburner, student, current, through to submitted, in review, and published.
  • TickTick is a good to-do list app that allows you to set due dates and reminders.