Simplify your lab life in 2019 using 4 categories.
Breaking down your lab management process can help to conserve mental energy and further save you time and money. You become less reactive and you become more proactive by organizing your workflow.
What is a budget? What does a budget mean to you?
The word “budget” is also much too associated with negative meanings for startups, entrepreneurs, or innovative discoveries. It doesn’t take much experience to know that these exploratory ventures usually entail a large deal of “waste” from the necessary trial and error required to succeed. This strategy, however, tends to be a nightmare for accounting or financial administrators whose job is to create balanced books and sustainable practices for the business/institutes.
What 3 traits do top team members possess? Beliefs.
It becomes difficult to teach and train fixed mindset candidates. They can believe that their skills are inherent, or are they’re born with them. These types of mindsets are belief systems that cannot be changed extrinsically through punishment or rewards. It has to come from within. However, it can be cultivated, if you know what to listen for.
What do you do when everything is due right now? Take 10.
Now I’m not the first, nor the only one who feels like there are a million things to do. I’m sure you’ve felt this way before and maybe even now, more than ever. To top that, you may feel you’re behind schedule with your research, your career, your family, and the list can go on. This is actually relatively normal for most highly ambitious people, but the problem doesn’t lie in the number of tasks we must complete, but in the choices of which tasks to even take on.
How can you find good help? Sell yourself.
A talented postdoc should be able to add their own unique perspective to the research, and they should see their role as an opportunity to be creative and to add value. However, as we plow through CVs and resumes we find applicants who expect a course to be laid out, or a lab to be already established. That’s never the case with a start up. There are so many uncertainties and variables that can lead to failure or bankruptcy. Therefore, finding a postdoc who understands this and can navigate these obstacles is critical.