Managing Lab work? - (Feb/07/2007 )

Have you felt that you have this overflowing amount of work that keep on pushed into pending list…because you could not manage all of the work in hand effectively..?
So how all of you do it when you have more than one experiment to run and data to analysis…???
Do you do the experiments together and do documentation separately.?

usually in my experiment i have some wait time, so i try to set other experiments by calculating the wait times .............so that i can perform more than 1 experiment at a time

find yourself a fluid experiment (like immunostaining where a few extra minutes of X wont matter) which also contains long wait times and run that in the background like an after thought (keep it simple though or you will be tearing your hair out - mines all gone so im ok)

A big desk planner does help alot

Some day I do 3-4 experiments together. Sometimes 5 experiments, but very rare...too stressful...

Do first experiments...during wait period (eg. incubation, centrifuge) do second experiments...during wait period do third experiments.
When I am not doing any experiments...make buffers, write lab book, analyze data, bioforum, eat lunch and go to toilet.

May be handy to have a timer that has four different settings...then you can do four experiments at the same time.
Just write on a piece of paper, what setting 1 is...2 is...3 is...4 is... so that you don't get confuse.


Hope this may help.

you have two categories of experiments :
- timing is important (kinetics, aggregation of protein, lysis)
- timing is not important or more or less (ELISA, western-blot)

so, schedule one or maybe two experiments from the first group with a organizer and a timer
and you can do in the same time several experiments of the second group.
always try to analyse your data in the same week, unless you will be completely lost.
therefor I only plan one experiment for friday, because I have data to analyse and also some delayed experiments that could not have been done before.

Also if you're doing an exp for the first time.. Plan a lot more time for it than you actually think it will take.. I noticed that usually you'll still have some things to work out while you're doing the exp.
Try to plan ahead, but don't plan to much.. If you have time left, you can always work on your analysis of data, working out extra notes or cleaning your desk! I usually am at the bioforum in stead of that one though!