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Prioritization through matrixing
Today went well. I haven’t been good at setting intentions for the day. My activity is still based on what the pressures are right in front of me. But having a task manager has been helpful in keeping all the individual pieces from scattering across email and slips of paper. Asana also has robust features that allow me to search task that have not been assigned yet, and for tasks that have not been assigned to a project. Add to that the ability to search robustly and change views from project to agenda to calendar, and I have a tool that is flexible enough for my daily, idiosyncratic thinking. Having…
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Personal Organization
What it takes to get my job done is a recurrent theme here. We are ending the semester, which marks my time here at a year and a half. This year has been dramatically different than my first. The first year was a collection of building things: relationships, instruction materials, community. There was no where to go but up and to the right with things to do. This year has been characterized as more. More work, more commitments, more meetings, more opportunities. The volume has been alarming. And I found very quickly that the methods I was using to keep track of my work wasn’t working. I needed to be…
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ELNs, LIMs, and project management
I finally have to jump into a different part of the data management pool–project management. For the past year I have been intermittently asked about electronic lab notebooks and options for them in basic science research. Over the past month I have had office hours flyers up in my basic science building and it caught the eye of a core resource department. They are a fee for service core that needs some help in project management and called me. My experience with electronic lab notebooks has been minimal. What I have seen so far is that the are too inflexible for practical use, or too expensive for implementation on a…