The research we do in my group are in fast-moving and highly competitive fields. My experience has been that working as a lone wolf in such fields can be highly frustrating, as one ends up chasing the shadows of internationally leading groups. I therefore have a strong emphasis on collaboration, both with biologists to ensure relevant problems and between team members to ensure rapid development and broad competence within projects. Perhaps even more importantly, this allows each team member to specialize so as to achieve deep knowledge in highly selective topics while relying on other members for completeness of competence. A part of this is to collaborate on computational infrastructure, so as to allow new methodology to be rapidly developed on top of a general, robust infrastructure.
To make this tight collaboration work, I have found some planning and communication routines to be very valuable. These involve very little overhead, in total much less than 5% of ones working time. I will not blindly force these habits on all team members, and I am open to trying out other routines, but I expect changes or exemptions to be based on well-thought-out arguments (for instance related to the very varying personalities of all of us that have chosen to work within research).
I have below summarized the routines I am currently applying in my team, where some operate per semester, some per week and some on a daily basis. I have also included some recommendations on individual practices and useful software to support such practices.
Per semester:
- In the beginning of a semester, everyone should fill out a rough plan of activities/goals for the semester, with a rough estimate of percentage of time spent on each activity/goal. It might be useful to have this hierarchical (divided into sections like courses, implementation, collaborations, work towards concrete articles, reading literature etc). The purpose is to get an overview of what to do in the coming time, gain a certain realism of what there will be time for, help overall prioritization, and communicate to other team members about ones focus.
- At the end of a semester, one should revise/update the semester plan and mentally note what went different. The purpose is to get an overview of how one at the overall level ended up prioritizing different aspects, see what might need a particular focus in order to get done (e.g. regarding activities according to long-term priorities vs short-term time pressure) and to bolster the memory of what one really did during the semester (as such memories may be anchors to accumulated knowledge/experience in future situations).
Per week:
- In a shared online spreadsheet, fill in a rough and brief entry on what one expects to spend the coming week on (at a resolution of 10% of total week effort), and fill in what the past week was spent on at same resolution. The purpose is to be conscious of what one is doing, to (inescapably) discover projects/tasks that are consistently postponed, avoid spending more time on a task than oneself really find it worth (a kind of informal timeboxing to counter sunk cost traps and more) and communicate to other team members about ones focus the coming week (communicate whether one appear open to potential new collaborations, and communicate on planned progress on any ongoing communications).
- Send a very brief progress email to the team, which may just be a screenshot of the entry in the spreadsheet above.
Per day:
- If participating in team projects: use Trello - make Trello cards for ones own tasks and tasks that are to be delegated to others, and check Trello for cards to work on.
Recommended individual practices and accompanying software:
- Use version control systems (with meaningful commits if that effort is deemed useful, but at least some form of automatically tracing changes to code documents)
- Use todo system (for instance OmniFocus on Mac and iOS)
- Use and check (!) calendar
- Use reference/literature management system (e.g. Papers)
- Use IDE (e.g. Eclipse)
- If issues with procrastination or distractions: Use time-boxing/productivity programs (like Vitamin-R for Mac, or Pomodoro)
- Use programs to accelerate computer use (e.g. Launchbar on Mac)
- Use collaborative editing where appropriate (e.g. Google Docs)
- RSI prevention software may also be useful (e.g. MacBreakZ on Mac)