Organize things in the way that works best for you – just start early and stay consistent!

• Establish a consistent naming and organization scheme for your files
  • Include date in file names
    • Save multiple (dates) drafts to go back to things you cut out, etc.
• save early and often – to the cloud
  • Regularly back up your laptop to an external drive

Keep detailed daily lab notes, organized by date

• Make sure you have your notes for the day written (or at least jotted down) before you go to bed (do it while things are still fresh)
• take pictures of physical notes and save them digitally

Additionally, keep easily accessible (in a folder or notebook tab or file – whatever works) things you need often:

• buffer recipes
• important coding snippets 
• a “cheat cheat” of things you often forget
• protocols
• experimental figures (see below)
• Make experimental figures as you go
  • Keep those figures in a figures or results tab, organized by experiment type and/or project

Experiment “easily”

• Write detailed experimental protocols that you can easily access
  • each time you go to do the experiment, make a copy of the protocol and edit & annotate with the particulars of that specific instance of doing it
    • I like to print out a copy of it and magnet it to the lab bench, then write on it any deviations from the protocol, measurements, etc.
      • then I tape into my physical lab book, take a picture for my notes pictures folder, and type it up in my electronic notebook
  • when possible, figure out your calculations at least the day before and review in the morning
• Make spreadsheets for calculating master mixes
• Bookmark key website conversion tools and things

Keep track of what you have

• maintain (up-to-date) inventories of:
  • primer & any other oligo sequences
  • plasmids, with information about size, antibiotic resistance
    • when relevant: protein tag?, protein size & pI (with and without tag)
  • cell pellets, protein preps, etc.

…but stay flexible because science doesn’t always like to follow your schedule – experiments might not work, the machine might give you an error code, etc. – and meetings tend to magically materialize

Stay up to date with what others are doing

• Set up alerts (through Google Scholar, PubCrawler, PubMed, etc.) and RSS feeds to stay up to date on the literature
  • I use the RSS reader NewsBlur
• Regularly check the “online now” sections of websites for key journals of interest
• Use a reference manager (Mendeley, Zotero, ReadCube, etc.) to save and organize it all