Lab Notebooks (2020)

One issue is whether to organize lab notebooks by project, or by time. In the latter case, this means the notebook is a record of your day-to-day activity, which has certain advantages (like having a single record to refer to), and disadvantages (reconstructing a project's timeline can be time-consuming if you're working concurrently on different projects). A decent compromise is to have a daily notebook, but never put work on two projects on the same page. Then if you really want to reconstruct a project's history from the daily journal, you can at least just copy pages.

The primary reason for having a lab bench notebook is that, if properly used, you can always reconstruct the process you were documenting. A lot of bench research involves protocol development, for example. In comparison with software engineering, a protocol is like an algorithm, only you're applying it to physical samples. In a well-run lab, once someone has developed a protocol, they 'publish' it (stick it in the lab's manual of protocols, where other people can have access to it). So, you don't share your lab notebooks with others, you share the completed protocol, and then if there's some question about if the protocol can be improved, you can go back to the lab notebooks to see what was already tried (this seems similar to software library or device driver development).

Some people don't like lab notebooks much, because properly recording what you did in enough detail that you can go back and repeat it eats up time and requires a certain discipline, and it often takes some unfortunate catastrophe (comparable to losing all your data backups) to learn the value of the practice.

Incidentally, if a research lab, public or private, has no guidelines at all on lab notebook practices, it's an indication they may be engaging in shady behavior (e.g. Theranos) - it's comparable to a crypto exchange outfit like FTX not having an accounting division, and should be a red flag for investors. This is also a reason for the ink-only rule, with pencil you can go back and fudge data more easily.

I agree with having shared team documentation but this has always been gray for me. My notebook ( and my softcopy log for the week) are incredibly raw (one-lines through mistakes, my personal commentary/snark, "napkin math",etc.). I am willing to share them with teammates/our lead/ or whoever may benefit but this has backfired on me. We perform analytical verification work and I've seen middling performers on our team look to avoid performing thorough work by copying from the notes of someone else ( I get this is work and not school so typical academic rules don't apply but our work is very investigative/exploratory in it's nature, performing derivations to ensure our approach is correct is encouraged and not considered a waste of time. Also contexts change quickly and a deep understanding is necessary) Thus when someone is trying to take a shortcut it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Also "micro-managers" see pages of notes open and treat it as fair game to pull up to my desk and expect immediate updates instead of requesting reasonably or waiting for the appropriate forum. I get this is a culture/staff issue more so than other things.

I have seen meticulous, beautiful lab notebooks before. Paper ones. With numbered oversize greenish pages, faintly quadrille ruled, filled with exceptional INK penmanship, paragraph after paragraph of cogent technical observations, theoretical musings, responses to papers, thought-experiments and real experiments, taped graphs and images. Everything dated and signed. I've seen stacks of them spanning YEARS of work.

I tried. Mine look like shit. If it's in ink, it's peppered ALL OVER with correction after correction after correction. Perhaps it's a matter of practice, but then I've not been at one place long enough where projects weren't constantly re-shuffled, killed, or lasted long enough to get a grip (sometimes the job and the company itself doesn't even last long enough).

Perhaps these are becoming a relic of a lost era? Paper is too much of an "air-gap" when everything is done on computer. Moreover, the standard 2-week Agile "sprint" leaves no time for careful thinking and writing. One can't put epiphanies gained from writing up notes into "the deliverable" for a freaking Jira Ticket.

I use lab notebook inspired process to share information across our engineering organization. It is like your daily standup, but written throughout the day.

https://bobek.cz/blog/2021/written-standup/

I've started writing a markdown file every day, with a separate heading for each project, and a tool that automatically creates an index page that says what topics (based on headings) were present each day.

Apart from the format of the headings, it is deliberately informal and unstructured. I've found it very useful.