Managing Work in Scientific Laboratories
Stay on track, see how all the pieces fit together, and keep everyone in the loop. Streamline routine lab activities to save time and avoid costly delays.
SciNote is your personal research management assistant
SciNote incorporates many features that can help you manage activities within your lab and monitor your progress. You can:
Customize SciNote with the flexible Projects/Experiments/Tasks structure
SciNote offers a flexible structure that emulates how research happens in the lab, so you can adopt effortlessly.
Think about how you will look for the data in question one year from now. This usually gives some idea what the main denominator is. Is it the name of a molecule? A customer? After you decide, consider this to be your project name.
Consider different aspects that describe your data. The name of a project, experiment, or task card may include the name of a researcher working on it, when it was done, who it is for, what it is targeting, what is the end product, what was the method, and so on.
Give thought to templates. To save time in digital environments, we like to copy-paste things. Think about how you could parse your work into units that could serve you as templates – this will help you deduce what a task, an experiment, or a project should be, and how to name it.
Monitor the progress of your projects so you can stay on track
SciNote offers you several great options for tracking the progress of your projects and work.
Take advantage of user roles and grant individual permissions to data access:
Monitor the progress of your work on the SciNote dashboard. The Current tasks section works as a perfect to-do list of your tasks. We made it very easy for you to track the due dates and the progress status of your tasks, so you can always be on top of your work.
Keep track of your ongoing projects in the Team projects section. On the project cards you can see who is assigned to each project and keep track of your team members comments. An alert will appear when any of the project’s tasks is overdue or due soon.
Set due dates to the tasks. Plan the timeline of your work in advance by setting up due dates on individual tasks. This will help you prioritize your tasks as well as giving you an additional boost to get things done on time.
Mark individual Steps and Tasks as Complete. Use this functionality to mark what has already been done, so you stay focus on what still needs to be done. Remember, completing things keeps you motivated.
Check your productivity in the Activities. Each entry or modification that you and any of your team members make in SciNote is recorded in the Activities. The comprehensive filtering options enable you to display only the activities related to a specific person, time frame, type of activities, projects, experiments, tasks, or any other object in SciNote.
See how connected tasks fit together through visualized workflows
Workflows in SciNote are a series of connected tasks that need to happen in a sequence. You can think of workflows in SciNote as processes of how you get your work done. They can span days, sometimes weeks. Here are some tips to help you establish great workflows and how to break up the work into individual Tasks:
Identify the stopping points. These are points when you can pause your work safely for a longer time.
Use the “effective day” approach. Think about how many hours in a day you can effectively work and use this a unit of how many activities you can pack into a Task.
Take collaborative aspects into account. Pieces of work that can be done by different people are good candidates to be existing as individual Tasks.
Alternative or parallel activities. When you can continue your work in more than one direction, that is a good point to introduce Tasks.
Reusability aspect. Identify elements of the workflow that have the potential of being re-used in other projects or workflows as individual SciNote Tasks.
Decision points. Whenever you need to pause and process interim results, that’s a good point to split the work into Tasks.
Set goals or milestones. Reaching a goal or milestone in your workflow is a good point for the transition between two Tasks.
Use a visual approach. Use SciNote canvas tool to outline the process, connect the Tasks, and worry about the content, protocols, steps of individual Tasks later on.
Do not overcomplicate. In case your work is too complex or spans a long time, split it up, cut it into more manageable workflows.
Do not be afraid to make mistakes. Perhaps your first workflow will not be perfect. You might need to execute it a few times in real life, not just as a thought-experiment before you will design the optimal one.
Work efficiently by turning frequent activities into repeatable templates
When you need to repeat or reuse a bigger piece of work, such as workflow composed out of a set of protocols (or tasks) that need to be executed in the exact order, you can use templates in SciNote:
Whenever you need to repeat something, there’s no need to start from scratch in SciNote, use templates.
Cross-reference people, inventory items and tasks to ensure traceability of work
Save time and use #. Mention a sample or any other inventory item used in the experiment and connect the data.
Ask questions and send comments. You can also tag people simply by adding @ before their name. Read more about team management and collaboration
Add hyperlinks to quickly find data. Include a link to a piece of work wherever you find it most convenient.
Manage protocols in the centralized protocol repository to maintain consistency
Protocols shared by the team. Protocols repository in SciNote acts as a centralized digital repository for your protocols and SOPs.
Your protocols. You can save your private protocols in SciNote. Once they are ready and optimized, connect them with your tasks, and be reassured you are using the correct protocol at all times.
Create your digital processes and knowledgebase. Any process that needs to be repeated can be managed as a protocol in SciNote protocols repository, which can become your digital knowledgebase. More about protocol & SOP management
Generate reports for regular reviews
Creating a report in SciNote is as easy as it can be. It will help you to wrap up the progress of your work, draw conclusions and define what still needs to be done. And you can also easily share it with others in pdf or docx format.
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