Chodera lab
 

Kai

Zen

5月4日2016

Bas Rustenburg

What can be improved about our lab meetings?

Timing of lunch

• We used to order lunch at the start
• Therefore, we'd eat AFTER lab meeting
  • Less distraction during the talk
  • Speaker gets to eat
• We could move lab meeting to start at 11 am, to facilitate lunch better.

Low frequency of meetings

• Each individual lab member doesn't get to present very often
• For instance, as many as 6 months between the last two meetings that I personally presented

Downsides of low frequency

• We get feedback less often as we'd like or need
• We need to spend much more time on introductory material
• It's more troublesome to miss a meeting, if the next one won't be for another 6 months.
  • Harder to have meetings without John
    • John travels a lot, leading to unused time

Therefore, I propose a different schedule

Two people!

• Each person gets a medium size 45 minutes timeslot
• As a rule, we aim for 15 minutes per slot for discussion

Two talks!

Image credit: Open Office

Benefits of the medium talk scheme

• Double the rotation frequency
  • Receive feedback more often
• Talk about more frequent topics
  • Less introduction
• Less problematic to miss a talk
  • There will be another one sooner
  • Possibly, unsupervised lab meetings
    • So more meetings total (1+1 > 2)!
• Better for attention spans!

More talks ≠ more work!

• More chances to engage in cooperative research
• Less repetition
• More opportunities for practicing communication

Project management

How to deal with deadlines

Planning anything is hard when

• We don't have a target date
• We don't have concise goals, and often change our minds
• Or we don't have plans on how to meet deadline

Note that:

An objective plus deadline is not the same as a plan!

Issues with poor planning

• We never find out about small problems because we only see the big picture
• We need to spend time on how long things will actually (not ideally) take. 

Common planning strategies

• Always overestimate the time something will take by about 30-50%.
• Have a daily schedule of minor tasks that need to be done to complete larger tasks
• One can use flowcharts/Gantt charts to accomplish this and plan multiple projects at once
• Very easy to see when plans need to be adjusted in order to make it to a deadline!

A Gantt chart is just a calendar!

Alternatively

• Use trello boards!

Thanks!