AsianScientist (Jan. 18, 2017) – Dear fellow scientist, congratulations! You’ve made it through another year of discovery. That spring in your step as you stride across the laboratory is highly commendable. The holiday season must have recharged your inner geek! Clearly, you’ve missed the whir of the centrifuges, the glare of the microscope, and the endearing scent of beta-mercaptoethanol. It’s 2017 and you’re off to a great start!
If the preceding paragraph did not sound at all like the opening to your year, fret not. Whether you’re still shaking off the inertia from the past weeks’ festivities or frantically trying to catch up on work carried over from 2016, here are some tips to keep your stress levels low and your morale high as you enter into the new year.
1. Get your priorities straight
Experiments have a funny way of growing exponentially in breadth and scale. What started off as a simple proof-of-concept in a cell culture dish suddenly evolves into a complex in vivo experiment involving multiple collaborators and animal models.
When faced with the myriad moving parts of a project, it’s easy to lose motivation and end up feeling like your efforts aren’t amounting to much. To maintain a positive outlook, list down all the experiments that need to be done, then order them according to your level of confidence in getting a clear outcome.
If qPCR is your forte, do that before the Western blots. Alternatively, re-evaluate how you might go about doing things more strategically. Perhaps the analysis of microarray data could help you to streamline your downstream efforts? Then that’s your first step before proceeding further. Basically, by prioritizing certain aspects of the seemingly insurmountable pile of experiments, you might be able to make faster headway and stay motivated.
2. Draw up some boundaries
If 2016 left you feeling a little burnt-out and the recent holiday season gave you some much-needed relief from work, you don’t want to go charging headfirst into 2017 without drawing up some boundaries to safeguard your physical and mental well-being. Everyone has their own threshold of stress tolerance and resilience, so as long as you’re putting in an honest day’s work, there’s no reason why some hours shouldn’t be set aside as off-limits to official matters.
Of course, there may be the occasional tight deadline, such as responses to journal reviewers, that require you to shift into high gear and clock some extra hours in the lab. We’ve all been there, and the only way out of that tunnel is through it. However, for other non-‘emergency’ scenarios, a less gruelling pace may be acceptable. Some negotiation with your boss or supervisor may be necessary, so do it tactfully and you may just discover that elusive creature called ‘work-life balance.’
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