Daily workflow

Welcome to the page of Daily Workflow.

David Allen, the author of Getting things done (GTD) which is the Bible of time management, first put forward his five steps workflow:

We (1) capture what has our attention; (2) clarify what each item means and what to do about it; (3) organize the results, which presents the options we (4) reflect on, which we then choose to (5) engage with.

Here, we also adopted this GTD workflow; however, G stands for GitHub.

First and foremost, the workflow should be goal-directed. Therefore the first to do in a day is to write down your daily objectives on Trello. Daily objectives mean what you want to achieve at the end of the day, which have to be specific, such as "inject plasmid in C.elegans", "make the camera capture at 500 fps", and "make fig.1 show AVA related to backward locomotion". Sometimes we fail, it doesn't matter, just keep doing tomorrow, maybe go through another way.

Second, search for good references on Google and GitHub before you get an idea of how to achieve the goal. I'd like to say solutions to 90% of my problems are just sitting there if you Google the right keywords. So actually the key is to understand the question/problem well, then you get the right keywords, then you search in Google, then you get the answer, simple as that.

Third, sometimes you may want to ask an expert for help when you've tried a while by yourself. You can post an issue on GitHub where your project is or add a card on Trello when you are not at computers. Also in some cases, you did a great job, or you found an excellent protocol for doing things. You can write them down on the project's wiki on GitHub. I believe this can help you understand/learn related concepts/procedures better.

Fourth, when you get something done (such as acquiring some good experiment data or making progress with your code), you have to put them into corresponding folders (e.g., Docs, Data, Results). In this way, you organize what you get, which would force you to think about the progress of your project and save you a lot of time when you want to retrieve them in the future.

Finally, at the end of work, you should commit and push your work to GitHub and archive your daily objectives on Trello. In this way, everything related to the project can be traced in an organized way, and all contributions can be quantified.