It’s no longer there! Searching for keywords only brings up a different project with closely related keywords. A colleague e-mails asking for some information, which she knows with certainty she stored in the upper right-hand corner of the desktop just under the cloud with the golden lining. A few months go by, and the screensaver of a beach at sunset is covered with files. People e-mail articles and protocols and onto the desktop they go. Things start slowly as she learns the ropes and she stores the few new files on her desktop, noting their location. Here’s a scenario: a post-doc arrives at her new lab. It’s amazing how this can suddenly get out of hand. Make folders for projects and use a standardized naming format. The perfect prep only has so many aliquots! 5. Computer Filing You can also use this to keep tabs on which culture/prep you have used and which is therefore no longer in storage in the freezer. When something seems unusual about the results, you can go back and quickly see if something was different in the preparative stages and then go to your logbook to see more details as necessary. 4. Keep a Summary Listįor example, if you are making protein preparations, make a list of the date of the expression culture, how you harvested it and relevant growth details, such as inducer concentration, growth time before and after induction, volume of the growth flask, and where and how you stored it. If you had a logbook for project one and a different one for project two it’s all there, no searching! Well, almost no searching. But the experiments are scattered through project two and you spend several hours trying to gather exactly what conclusions you made and what is the best way forward. A year later, project two reaches completion (hopefully positive!) and now you need to go back to project one. Every now and then you do some experiments on project one. Three months later, a new project takes off and you add it to your logbook. You set up the experiment and start a logbook. For example, one sunny day, your PI comes up with a new idea he/she wants you to test. When you start a new project, start a new logbook. My lab is now fully electronic in terms of logging experiments (yippee!), which makes the rough notebook invaluable. I use a rough notebook to scribble in and a logbook to write neatly or at least legibly. Plus, if you’ve taken the time to write everything down, it makes you look smart when the first thing your PI wants to know is how things are going before you’ve even had your first coffee. what are the questions you are trying to answer in the small and big pictures) and to plan next steps. This can also be a chance to gather your thoughts on the bigger perspective of the experiment (i.e. The best, and in the end least painful, method is to take some time at the end of the day to write your logbook. Take Time to Write Your Logĭon’t leave it until the last minute on Friday evening when you would rather be at the pub, beer in hand. Here are some tricks that I have found handy over the years from learning the hard way! 1. How long did you dialyze for? At what temperature? Was that 50 mM or 200 mM NaCl you used that time when the protein band was so perfectly pure that you let out a whoop of joy? As you rifle through your logbook, it becomes clear that you never wrote down the precise conditions of what worked best or the little things that you changed. That’s when your PI asks you to do experiment 101.
Log book hours spreadsheet how to#
It’s hard to imagine when you are doing an experiment for the 100 th time that you will ever forget how to do it but a year down the line, when you’ve moved on, things get rusty.
Log book hours spreadsheet archive#
Unless you are one of those rare breeds that do organization naturally, setting a system in place to archive your experiments takes practice and perseverance.