Friday, January 15, 2010

Work Related Resolutions for 2010

This year I have two work-related resolutions for 2010, and both were based on hard-learned lessons over the course of 2009.

1. Better Organization: 2009 was a productive year, but there is always room for improvement. To that end, I'm trying the "daily planner" route again, I'm learning the in's and out's of MS's Outlook Calendar, and I'm attempting to resurrect efforts to get electronic notebooks into the lab.

2. Field Work: Make no bones about it, I'm a lab rat. The extent of "field work" I ever did was to go to another state to do some lab work. After debacles with collaborators retiring technicians, samples showing up in my lab without advance notification, and incomplete site histories rendering my efforts all but useless, I've decided that I will no longer rely on collaborators alone to send me samples for analysis. So my lab and I are making a concerted effort to find new locations for our research efforts. We started that this week with a couple of riparian sites which we'll begin studying soon.

Currently a bit waterlogged

I wonder if they'll let me buy a gator?

5 comments:

Genomic Repairman said...

Man if you get a gator I'll come do sitework with you. I love those things, I use to drive one when I worked at a county park in high school.

soil mama said...

I love field work! I've also been burned early in my PhD after trying to deal with samples others collected. I'm still trying to sort out that crappy paper. After that, I've been pretty anal about doing field work myself so I KNOW what I am getting - the data is sooo much cleaner. I know that someday I may have to rely on technicians to collect samples, but it will be hard for me to let go.

I'm interested to hear how the organization goes. maybw you can do a book review on "Getting Things Done"

Tom said...

I'll definitely give a report on the book ... as soon as I can start it in earnest. I have grant reviews to complete before the 19th so I've got to get those out the door first.

Ivan Privaci said...

I am vastly amused by the concept of being prevented from reading a book on "Getting Things Done" due to having too many things to do...

(Easily amused...and laughing about it.)

Tom said...

Epi: Yeah yeah, laugh it up funnyman. Yah, it's a bit ironic, isn't it? :)

The review is done now though, so the reading may commence!