If You Can Organize Your Lab. . . Posted on January 20, 2009 Dr. Patricia Molina suggests that applying logical structure to your personal life can make both personal and professional lives easier.

Most of us do not plan or do not schedule our lives the way that we schedule appointments, the way that we schedule a visit to the physician, the way that we schedule having our hair cut. Most of us get up every morning and life just hits us. And you make decisions based on your immediate environment, thinking that, oh, yeah, I'm going to figure out a way to do it.

What I now tell my students and my trainees particularly in the lab is life is like an experiment. Just as when we're going to do an experiment, you have to do the preparation. You have to write a protocol. You have to see what ingredients you're going to need. What are the reagents? Do we have the tubes that we need to save the samples? Do we have everything that we need to be able to process the assay?

There's a lot of preparation going on before the day that you actually come into the laboratory and run your experiment. So that if you've done a good job up to then, the day you come in, you run your experiment and small glitches that arise throughout, you can fix them. But if you don't do that preparation, you come in and you have no idea what's going to hit you.

And I lived it. When I had my first son, I still had not finished my final exams for finishing medical school. And I still had to write my dissertation, and in Guatemala, in our medical school, you have to write a dissertation to finish medical school. And that feeling of not knowing how am I going to get plugged back into the system was perhaps more stressful than finding myself as a new mom. That feeling of what is going to be my path? Who's going to help me? Where am I going to go back in? What kinds of activities am I going to be able to get engaged in that are going to allow me to have this life that I want to have?

So that is something that I think requires a lot of pre-thought, a lot of planning. I can tell you that when I had my second child, I had it very, very well thought out. He was born when I was in graduate school. But when he was born, I was done with my initial exams. I had finished most of my lab work. And so I really only had like one more experiment to go before I could finish my dissertation. So having him was, I mean there was like a science to it. I had done my homework. I had done my research. And things were much better.

My third child, within three days of having had him, I was running lab meetings at my house. So it became something that I thought, I need to figure out what it is that I need to do to be able to do this family thing that meant so much to me, but to be able to show that that is not going to make me stay behind or be a step behind.