Staying organized while sciencing (organizing experiment notes, files, protocols, inventories, etc.)

Organize things in the way that works best for you - just start early and stay consistent!
Establish a consistent naming and organization scheme for your files
Include date in file names
Save multiple (dates) drafts to go back to things you cut out, etc.
save early and often - to the cloud
Regularly back up your laptop to an external drive

Keep detailed daily lab notes, organized by date
Make sure you have your notes for the day written (or at least jotted down) before you go to bed (do it while things are still fresh)
take pictures of physical notes and save them digitally

Additionally, keep easily accessible (in a folder or notebook tab or file - whatever works) things you need often:
buffer recipes
important coding snippets
a “cheat cheat” of things you often forget
protocols
experimental figures (see below)
Make experimental figures as you go
Keep those figures in a figures or results tab, organized by experiment type and/or project

Experiment “easily”
Write detailed experimental protocols that you can easily access
each time you go to do the experiment, make a copy of the protocol and edit & annotate with the particulars of that specific instance of doing it
I like to print out a copy of it and magnet it to the lab bench, then write on it any deviations from the protocol, measurements, etc.
then I tape into my physical lab book, take a picture for my notes pictures folder, and type it up in my electronic notebook
when possible, figure out your calculations at least the day before and review in the morning
Make spreadsheets for calculating master mixes
Bookmark key website conversion tools and things

Keep track of what you have
maintain (up-to-date) inventories of:
primer & any other oligo sequences
plasmids, with information about size, antibiotic resistance
when relevant: protein tag?, protein size & pI (with and without tag)
cell pellets, protein preps, etc.

Plan ahead as much as possible…
longer-term/bigger-picture thinking, periodically (every couple weeks or so) make a to do list and a project status summary
day to day, plan out experiments thoroughly at least the day before
if you have multiple things to do, plan how you can stagger, etc.

…but stay flexible because science doesn’t always like to follow your schedule - experiments might not work, the machine might give you an error code, etc. - and meetings tend to magically materialize

Stay up to date with what others are doing
Set up alerts (through Google Scholar, PubCrawler, PubMed, etc.) and RSS feeds to stay up to date on the literature
I use the RSS reader NewsBlur
Regularly check the “online now” sections of websites for key journals of interest
Use a reference manager (Mendeley, Zotero, ReadCube, etc.) to save and organize it all

YouTube:    • Staying organized while sciencing (or...   ; blog: https://bit.ly/stay_organized_science
doc version: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17...

more on plasmid inventorying: https://bit.ly/plasmid_inventory ; YouTube:    • Keeping a detailed plasmid inventory    
 
You can download my template here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...

more on protein inventorying: https://bit.ly/protein_inventorying ; YouTube:    • Protein prep inventory-ing: keeping a...  

here’s a link to my example protein prep inventory template spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...  
 
more on master mixes: http://bit.ly/mastermixesmultichannels &    • Mastering master mixes - calculations...  
  
more on alerts & RSS feeds: blog form: https://bit.ly/science_alerts_RSS_feeds  ; YouTube:    • Staying up to date in science - setti...     

more on reference managers: https://bit.ly/referencesreference ; YouTube:    • Mendeley and other reference manageme...   

more on Adobe Illustrator: https://bit.ly/adobe_illustrator_fund... &    • Adobe Illustrator fundamentals for sc...   & https://drive.google.com/file/d/1C72z...

link to this and other guides, tip sheets, etc. https://bit.ly/bumbling_uploads  
  
more about all sorts of things: #365DaysOfScience All (with topics listed) 👉 http://bit.ly/2OllAB0 or search blog: http://thebumblingbiochemist.com