"Once an experiment has been ‘Complete’ for a week, change its tag to ‘Archived’ so it doesn’t show up on the dashboard."
Notion certainly has many limitations (and I say that as a diehard Notion 'stan) but I don't see how this is one of them. Just create a view of your database that has an "advanced" filter rule of "(status is not complete) OR (status is complete AND last edited time < 1 week ago).
Thanks for a detailed and inspiring write-up. I'm constantly trying to improve the organization of my lab notes and your approach brings a refreshing perspective.
I've got a few practical questions:
1. Do you have certain structure/guidelines to the free-form part of the Experiment page where people keep their daily notes? I find that enforcing a certain structure helps with readability and lowers chances of errors but is quite time consuming to do, especially when developing new assays. I find that people in many cases end up leaving out a lot of information (e.g., final concentrations because it takes time to compute them) or perform smaller scale experiments even though they could run many more conditions in parallel if they just planned better. I've experimented with ChatGPT o3-generated protocols based on the input materials and goals of an experiment, and that works ok but still needs a few iterations and manual fixes to work properly.
2. How do you decide that a new Experiment page needs to be started? Personally, I find that I often need to optimize my assay quite a bit before it works well, and more often than not it involves testing/optimizing smaller bits of the originally planned experiment. I end up starting a new page for these side quests, but then it becomes disorganized quickly. Perhaps a Project page is a sufficient solution. Or just accepting that experiments branch out organically and there should be no expectation of a perfect order.
3. How do you keep your output materials organized in a box? I understand that each one gets a label, but the label is not self-explanatory. Does that mean people in the lab must constantly loop up materials in the database? Do you have laptops just sitting in the lab for that purpose? We use tablets in our lab but I find them only good for viewing, not adding new entries, and people don't want to bring their laptops to a wet lab due to a possible contamination. Also, entering every single tube with the outputs of an experiment into a database and printing labels seems somewhat tedious (in spite of how useful it is!) – I wonder how easy it was for your researchers to adopt to this new habit.
Maybe other folks at Pioneer would want to chime in here, but here's my take on these questions
1. When you make a new experiment, we have it auto-populate with a few default headings in the unstructured part (Purpose, Background, Experiment Design, Lab Notebook, Conclusions and Next steps). In terms of expectations for what to write down, that sort of evolves organically. Other people at Pioneer are good about taking notes, so that alone creates a social expectation to do similarly. Some people write really fantastic notes, and once you've seen someone else do it well you start getting the picture. Once we've done a protocol a few times it becomes more clear what's worth writing down. For new protocols, the steps get written directly in the daily notes. We also have a protocols database once we have something that gets reused, and in that case it just gets linked.
2. Yeah this is hard! For sure, lots of times you do an experiment and the conclusion is to re-do it/try again :P Sometimes folks just include the next round in the same experiment page, and this makes the most sense if you just had a total technical failure and just need to try it again. If it's getting long, or if the first experiment taught us something even if we want to re-do, they'll close the experiment out and start fresh. Agreed that projects help keep track of side quests. IMO needing to fill out an experiment page for side quests and tag a project is easy, but also enough of a reality check to encourage folks not to go off on crazy side quests that aren't worth it.
3. We have a laptop in lab that has the LIMS open in one tab and the label printer in the other. Once you're accustomed to doing it, printing labels is easy enough that it's arguably easier than writing on a tube... at least for any tube you want to keep around for any length of time. Separately, once folks are back at their desk they can write any notes about the LIMS objects they've made, copy paste the numbers into their experiment page, etc. Agreed that not all samples are worthy of being preserved forever, and indeed not all tubes in lab are assigned LIMS objects. So if you've made a overnight culture and are going to miniprep it, the *only* tube that gets a LIMS ID is the final prep.
"Once an experiment has been ‘Complete’ for a week, change its tag to ‘Archived’ so it doesn’t show up on the dashboard."
Notion certainly has many limitations (and I say that as a diehard Notion 'stan) but I don't see how this is one of them. Just create a view of your database that has an "advanced" filter rule of "(status is not complete) OR (status is complete AND last edited time < 1 week ago).
Hmm I’ll check it out! Notion rolled out some automation improvements since I set this up, maybe it’s now possible.
Thanks for a detailed and inspiring write-up. I'm constantly trying to improve the organization of my lab notes and your approach brings a refreshing perspective.
I've got a few practical questions:
1. Do you have certain structure/guidelines to the free-form part of the Experiment page where people keep their daily notes? I find that enforcing a certain structure helps with readability and lowers chances of errors but is quite time consuming to do, especially when developing new assays. I find that people in many cases end up leaving out a lot of information (e.g., final concentrations because it takes time to compute them) or perform smaller scale experiments even though they could run many more conditions in parallel if they just planned better. I've experimented with ChatGPT o3-generated protocols based on the input materials and goals of an experiment, and that works ok but still needs a few iterations and manual fixes to work properly.
2. How do you decide that a new Experiment page needs to be started? Personally, I find that I often need to optimize my assay quite a bit before it works well, and more often than not it involves testing/optimizing smaller bits of the originally planned experiment. I end up starting a new page for these side quests, but then it becomes disorganized quickly. Perhaps a Project page is a sufficient solution. Or just accepting that experiments branch out organically and there should be no expectation of a perfect order.
3. How do you keep your output materials organized in a box? I understand that each one gets a label, but the label is not self-explanatory. Does that mean people in the lab must constantly loop up materials in the database? Do you have laptops just sitting in the lab for that purpose? We use tablets in our lab but I find them only good for viewing, not adding new entries, and people don't want to bring their laptops to a wet lab due to a possible contamination. Also, entering every single tube with the outputs of an experiment into a database and printing labels seems somewhat tedious (in spite of how useful it is!) – I wonder how easy it was for your researchers to adopt to this new habit.
Maybe other folks at Pioneer would want to chime in here, but here's my take on these questions
1. When you make a new experiment, we have it auto-populate with a few default headings in the unstructured part (Purpose, Background, Experiment Design, Lab Notebook, Conclusions and Next steps). In terms of expectations for what to write down, that sort of evolves organically. Other people at Pioneer are good about taking notes, so that alone creates a social expectation to do similarly. Some people write really fantastic notes, and once you've seen someone else do it well you start getting the picture. Once we've done a protocol a few times it becomes more clear what's worth writing down. For new protocols, the steps get written directly in the daily notes. We also have a protocols database once we have something that gets reused, and in that case it just gets linked.
2. Yeah this is hard! For sure, lots of times you do an experiment and the conclusion is to re-do it/try again :P Sometimes folks just include the next round in the same experiment page, and this makes the most sense if you just had a total technical failure and just need to try it again. If it's getting long, or if the first experiment taught us something even if we want to re-do, they'll close the experiment out and start fresh. Agreed that projects help keep track of side quests. IMO needing to fill out an experiment page for side quests and tag a project is easy, but also enough of a reality check to encourage folks not to go off on crazy side quests that aren't worth it.
3. We have a laptop in lab that has the LIMS open in one tab and the label printer in the other. Once you're accustomed to doing it, printing labels is easy enough that it's arguably easier than writing on a tube... at least for any tube you want to keep around for any length of time. Separately, once folks are back at their desk they can write any notes about the LIMS objects they've made, copy paste the numbers into their experiment page, etc. Agreed that not all samples are worthy of being preserved forever, and indeed not all tubes in lab are assigned LIMS objects. So if you've made a overnight culture and are going to miniprep it, the *only* tube that gets a LIMS ID is the final prep.