Time Management

I think one of the hardest parts about being freelance full time is the act of juggling my schedule. This includes my different work projects (currently I have one that's super active, several more in the wings, and some on hold while I wait for feedback) but also my personal projects and appointments and plans with friends. If I want to have good work/life balance, I have to keep track of how I spend my time and stick to my internal deadlines and checkpoints on projects to prevent procrastinator's meltdown.

To keep on top of my commitments I've tried lots of different schedulers. Most recently this includes awesome planning systems like the Passion Planner (which I still love but find a little restrictive) and the Happy Planner (which I love aesthetically but didn't really work out for me). Until I started my DIY little brain book planner, I had a hard time getting everything I wanted. 

Here's what I've learned: 

1. I hate regular to-do lists. The act of writing stuff down in a particular order really stresses me out--I put a lot of pressure on myself to make sure I'm putting the "right" thing first. In general I've found that I'm not a super linear thinker, and my diary/planner/brain book has to allow me to think non-linearly in order for it to be successful. It's hard to find a designed planner that allows for mind mapping, so I have turned to a DIY option.
2. Related to the first one: I will overload myself given a chance. I'm always overly optimistic about my projects and the time I have to complete them in. With a small notebook, I can generally fit about 5-6 things I have to get done on a single mind map. More than that and I'm overreaching and probably on a track to burn myself out. Knowing this limitation really helps me prioritize.
3. Wasted days/weeks/months bug me. I'll admit it, sometimes I fall off the wagon. I hate looking back and seeing that there are wasted pages in my planner. 
4. It needs to be portable. Like, really portable. The PP was okay and the HP was horrible in terms of portability. If I don't have it on me I won't use it. My current brain book is 4"x6" and fits in my back pocket (I know because I've carried it around in my back pocket before).
5. I really appreciate a space to journal when I need it. I definitely don't journal every day, but I've found that on days when my anxiety is up, having a space to journal is really helpful for sorting out my feelings and getting them out of my head. 

So what does this all amount to? 

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All three Brainz Books

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A monthly spread

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Mind map

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A spread from before Panama

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Meal planning & grocery list

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Post its!

A tiny notebook, about $6/pop, that I write in. Specifically I really like the pocket Decomposition Book, sold at my local indie bookstore.* The pages are a little thin, but overall they hold up pretty well and are way cheaper than a comparable Moleskine. I use mind maps for daily planning, and hand-drawn monthly pages as I need them. It's stupidly simple. It allows for whatever I need it to be.

My "Brain Book" includes: 

• daily to-do lists (mind maps, technically) and appointment reminders
• a spot for daily journaling
• monthly layouts with appointments that are further out, deadlines for projects, and holidays/vacations
• a place to write out passwords I need to remember
• meal plans and grocery lists (I'm trying to save money for a trip to Scotland next year, and most of my discretionary income right now goes towards eating out--planning my meals and sticking to that plan really helps keep me on target to save cash!)
• important notes to myself about projects or phone calls I made
• miscellaneous lists for traveling, projects, supplies, and errands
• when I'm at conferences it also serves as my note-taking space about talks I saw and people I met

It's not fancy but it works for me. I'm on my third book after 7 months and about to go get another. The most important thing I find is that this forces me to think about what I want to get done in a day in order to feel productive and "on top of things". And if I don't mind map, that's okay too. No wasted space. If I need to journal about something that happened or a feeling I've been having, I have a place for it.

How do you guys keep track of your projects and daily schedule? What systems have you tried? 

* I use the same notebooks for projects and lab notes/drawings as well, just in the big size.

Panama: T-Minus One Month!

I'm officially less than a month away from my trip to Panama. (Insert me screaming on the inside here!)

I'm busy getting my art supplies ready, packing sun screen, and figuring out my blog schedule while I'm away. 

One question my taxonomists had is what they needed to bring for me, and it got me thinking this would be a great blog post for you all!

First the don'ts: 

Don't ask me to copy an existing diagram. This is against copyright laws and is illegal (except in a very few special circumstances). I can take inspiration in the layout, the way the original artist rendered the subject, and how the data is presented, but I can't reproduce someone else's diagram in good conscience. 

And the do's:

I love when my scientist collaborators have though about and can answer the following three questions!

1. What does the illustration need to convey? A specific character trait or the set up for your lab equipment? 
2. What does your ideal illustration look like? Do you want something classic and stippled or a modern digital drawing?
3. What materials do you find yourself referring to when you have to present on the subject? Do you use big sweeping diagrams of a life cycle or a specific photograph of your lab equipment? 

Keep this in mind when you're looking to have an artist illustrate something for your research!

What do you ask your illustrators when you're looking for scientific illustration work?

Lab Notebook Tips: the Nitty Gritty

My astronomy teacher in high school was a complete autocrat about scale for all his diagrams and all our student illustrations on tests (he'd mark you down for doing a drawing and not adding "Not to scale"!). In his field, this makes a lot of sense. 

Without the note on scale, someone looking at a drawing of the earth, moon, and sun for the first time could think they're all nearly the same size and VERY close together.  

I owe him a great deal, because his vehemence has always stuck with me. And it feeds pretty well into my topic today: the nitty gritty of lab notebooks.

That's right, all the potentially unexciting data that has to be recorded along with your more engaging observations.

This includes: 

1. Scale, or size, usually demarcated in meters, kilometers, milimeters depending on subject

2. Date and time–especially important for time-sensitive phenomena like tides, embryonic development, and long duration experiments

3. Temperature/atmospheric conditions–more important for field notes than laboratory notes, though to some extent embryonic development can be temperature dependent

If you have to improvise measuring some of these, that's okay! For scale you can use coins in your pocket or how tall something was relative to yourself (I even know someone who had a scale bar in centimeters tattooed on the side of his forefinger so he would never be without a ruler!)

As for temperature and atmospheric conditions, even a note like "hot as hell and cloudy" is better than nothing for your field notes! If you've included the date and time you can also always go back and add in exact temperature after checking the weather reports for that area.

Scale bars here put in perspective a larval sea urchin and an adult sea urchin. Date, time, and temperature are quite important even in lab situations when there's larval or embryonic development going on.  

The reason to take these notations? You risk not remembering these things later, but more importantly, another person who wasn't there with you wouldn't know this background info. There may be key details in the weather or the size of your subject that you don't know yet are key!

Next week on Lab Notebook Tips: tips for drawing!

Do you have something you want featured in the Lab Notebook Tips? Leave a comment!