Separate your work out into all the individual projects you are doing at the same time. If you are only doing one, then break it up into sub-projects.
Plan ahead for each project you are doing, making sure you do not oversubscribe your time with too many large procedures on the same day. Allocate time for planning and analysing and this will prevent you from rushing things, and allow you to book rooms or machines earlier.
Get Practical Tips- Use a computer to make your plan (rather than a paper planner) as it will make it much easier to alter when you inevitably need to make changes. Excel or google calendar are possibilities.
- You could make up your own colour code system like the example shown below. An important note is the number of large procedures you are doing, so that you can ensure you do not have too many on any single day. If you do, then you can probably rearrange one.
- Each day, note down exactly what experiments you have to do for that day in your notebook, and then you can tick off the items as you complete them. This will stop you going home with an incomplete list.
- Remember to allow time to analyse your data.
Read Personal Perspective
When I started planning not just my individual procedures but the time I allocated between each of them, the quality of my work greatly increased. It removed the stress of finding someone else had booked rooms or machines I needed, and allowed me to space the work out so I wasn’t working until midnight trying to fit three big procedures into a single day. I only wish I started doing this earlier.
