Time Management

If you’re ever concerned about your ability to maintain work/life balance or manage your working time/progress effectively, please reach out so we can have a discussion. Grad school (and time as a postdoc) is hard and takes a tremendous amount of effort, but that effort should be generally out of excitement, not despair.

Science is done best when we work together and pursue research as a team. For this reason, it is expected that all group members are present on campus most days during the majority of the core working hours of 10 am – 2 pm, acknowledging that some may prefer to start earlier while others may prefer to work later. 

Meetings should be scheduled between the hours of 9 am and 5 pm, unless otherwise preferred by all parties involved.

You are strongly encouraged to take your university-allotted vacation days. You should coordinate with me at least one week in advance if you plan to be gone for an extended period of time, mostly so I can re-assign any time sensitive tasks.

If you will be unexpectedly away from campus due to illness or other circumstances, or if you will miss group/department meetings or events, please let me know as soon as possible.

You are not expected to work on weekends or holidays.

One group member’s working hours may not match another’s. Be respectful of each other’s time and set reasonable expectations for responses to forms of asynchronous communication (chat messages, email)

Enjoy life outside the lab!! You are so much more than your research – find your passion outside the lab and make a point of spending time in that space and with people you care about. We also do better work when we’re happy, and your brain needs time to rest, process experiments, and come up with new ideas.

Eat right, get enough sleep, and exercise – I promise, it’s more than worth the time and effort invested.

I have no interest in timekeeping or micromanaging your lab hours. It is my belief that as long as you are completing the necessary tasks for your work on a given day and making progress overall, the number of hours it takes you to do so is irrelevant. This may mean that you work longer hours one week and shorter hours the next, or you spend the majority of your working time in lab one day and the entire next day working up data or writing. This approach requires self-discipline; it is up to you to hold yourself accountable and ensure you are on track to achieving your goals on an appropriate timeline. A reminder of some of the responsibilities (not an exhaustive list) that we commit to and need to make time for as professional researchers :

• • Experiments – Our ideas on paper mean nothing unless we execute them in the lab, and this is also how we will often come up with new ideas as well. Especially as PhD students and postdocs, a large portion of your time should be spent in lab.

  • Data processing and analysis – while the experiments themselves need to be done, we should be regularly processing and analyzing the data to ensure we are doing the right experiments and to keep tabs on how the results are shaping up in real time.

  • Reading ­– I am a very strong believer that one of the best things we can do for ourselves as scientists is read the literature. Read what is relevant to your research, what is tangential, and what is just interesting but (seemingly) unrelated. Reading other people’s work will give you insight on what has been done in the past, what the current state of the art may be, where the field is going, what gaps you may be able to fill with your own interests/ideas, and new techniques you could use to improve your current work. Read what I send you, share what you find with others, set alerts for your favorite topics/researchers, and never be afraid to dig in to something new – and acknowledge that you will need to set aside time for this.

  • Writing – Manuscript writing is detailed further in the “publishing’ section, but we should all take pride and responsibility in disseminating the findings of our work. We also spend time writing about research we haven’t done yet, usually in the form of grants or fellowships (but there are others too!) and reading/writing about research done by others, often in the form of manuscript reviews for journals or colleagues.

  • Mentoring and teaching – I believe it’s important to share what we do and our excitement for it with others. Whether this is in the context of lab work or professional development, using your skills and knowledge to empower and open doors for someone else will always be worth your time. Plus, you often learn to do things best yourself by teaching someone else! It is also important that we seek out and accept mentorship ourselves, as we all have things to learn from those around us.

  • Idea generation/experiment design – We need to regularly evaluate whether we’re focusing on the most impactful and relevant scientific problems. It’s important to take time to think about the questions we’re asking and the experiments we’re designing to answer them.

  • Career development – A research career is one that is never standing still. No matter what stage of your career you are in, there will always be new goals for you to chase. Spending time on your professional development is important and can consist of things like preparing for/attending conferences, planning/attending workshops, figuring out your next research position, working on award nominations, and many others.

  • Communication – Whether we’re answering a few quick emails or engaging in lengthy collaborative discussions, being an effective communicator takes time. We should acknowledge this as a priority, not an afterthought, as part of our efforts to be a high-functioning team of researchers.