Don’t Do Too Many Things at Once

1. When you are doing more than one procedure at a time, plan out the steps so that they do not overlap at any point.
2. Planning the time it will take you to complete protocols requires practice. At the start you will inevitably underestimate it. Therefore, if you are trying to fit several things all in the same day, allow extra time to do each bit.
3. If you need to do multiple procedures at once, organisation is the key. Don’t rush in to starting the first one or you might as well not bother. Plan them all thoroughly before starting, so that you know exactly what to do before you have to do it.

1. If you are planning to do multiple samples all at once, the first ones to be put in treatment might remain there for significantly longer than the last ones. This can be avoided by always starting with the same sample and staggering them, so that you only do a subset of samples at a time.
2. Use a lab timer. If you don’t have one, then ask for one. Don’t use your phone for this. While you might have a great app, you might also get something nasty on your phone. Then on your face.

I can remember weeks when my planner looked like a code book with the page lines cramming multiple sentences on top of each other. I had fallen victim to the fallacy that because I could fit the words describing the tasks in my calendar, it meant I could fit the time it would take to do them into the hours of a day.

When people were using equipment I needed, or it did not immediately work at the required speed, one experiment started to eat into another. Sometimes I was there well into the night, and generally the quality of the work was lower than if I had done them on separate days.