Questions you should always be able to answer

What is the title of your paper (in progress, the one you are doing the bench work for)?

What are you doing this work ?

• • Your time is valuable, why expend your effort on this problem and not another one?

  • Why is it important ?

  • Why is this a major advancement ?

  • What what has been done before (literature) ? New and novel work required !

What else can you be doing at the same time (parallel tasks)?

• • There is no such thing as waiting, you should be working on other tasks and moving other aspects of your project forward if there is a block.

  • What other figures / data can you be working on ?

What specifically do you plan to do next?

• • What will you get this finsihed quickly ?

  • What does this build upon your skills or resources in the lab ?

  • What do you foresee be the major problems or obstacles ? How do you plan to overcome these ?