I am collecting ways to better organize the lab, the group and all the management tasks we need to do such as inventory, accountability, project management, lab purchases etc ... everything that can save time and facilitate our scientific life! Please share!
The Eisenhower Matrix helps establish priorities in light of importance and urgency. The four possible outcomes are (1) important and urgent, (2) important but not urgent, (3) not important but urgent, and (4) not important and not urgent. Accordingly, the corresponding decisions are to do, schedule, delegate, or eliminate.
It’s important to schedule your time to track overall deadlines and goals while knowing what steps need to be taken to achieve them. Some people like to make to-do lists and others do not, but what’s important is to find a system that works for you. It may reduce your time for organizing things.
Kaplpathy and Alaa put "Organizing". I wish to stress the same in a more sharp way -- a lot of time and patience is needed to persuade your research subordinates to perform some dull but necessary administrative duties -- to re-format the quarterly report on a project accordingly to a new standard, to fill the changed form of request for funds to attend a conference, to make the contract with a contractor and to move this contract through the university accounting department etc. In many universities the bureaucratic procedures surrounding the activities of research units are constantly changing and generally augmenting, in most cases you cannot allow to keep a very experienced and 'pushy' non-academic person as a full-time project manager, so good researchers usually and often ask you "Why it is my duty to (re)write this stupid form?" .
Dear Igor,
Organizing is a tough task. It compasses various aspects of Managing your research.We cannot be too critical of others because their perspectives will be different. Patience is the key.
Dear all, thank you for your answers! Maybe Kalpathy Ramaiyer Subramanian and Alaa Fadhil
Would like to specify what they mean about organizing? Organizing tasks for your own research? Organizing the students? Organizing the financials of projects? If you have a laboratory, maybe organizing inventory?
By organizing I mean fulfilling a list of tasks involved in achieving the objectives. Thank you
I would argue that it is the constantly changing regulations about everything institutional. The regulations on how to do simple tasks like add members to your lab, get access to facilities, get equipment or space reserved, purchasing, etc. change constantly so what should take maybe 15-30 minutes winds up taking several days and multiple contacts and emails to achieve. Nothing is done the same way twice with regards to these kinds of duties. Coordinating all of these things during a huge experiment can be difficult to say the least. Outside of these things, I would argue the most time consuming thing can be running around making sure that tasks are being completed by individuals as asked, their work is efficient, repeatable, and adequately documented, and that safety regulations are being adhered to and are up to date.