With the new year coming in and myriad projects, grants, and (yes) students demanding my attention, I'd like to formalize how I think research-focused meetings should go in the lab. I have written here some guidance about how I'd like to approach meetings going forward.
This is intended to be a “living” document, so that how we conduct meetings in the lab are evolve along with our understanding of best practices.
Everyone must check in with me at least once per week (even if the update is only a written update). This will make scheduling easier for me and also help to enforce that everyone chats with me at least once per week. While a regular meeting time won't always agree with the pace of research, I think the routine will help to enforce a bit more structure on the project management side of things; see below for my thoughts there.
If you need to move your meeting, try to find a time to switch with someone else. Since my time is going to be fairly structured this term, if you cannot make your usual meeting time, you should try to find a time to switch with someone else. Since the meeting slots will be regular (and the times on Notion), it shouldn't be too difficult.
Don't cancel meetings unless you must. In the past, I have allowed people to skip meeting for multiple weeks at a time because you did not feel as if much progress had been made. Canceling meeting is a slippery slope: if you only have meetings when you have results to share, you miss out on an opportunity to become unstuck and to discuss your longer-term objectives. Try to find topics to discuss, which can include questions you've been curious about, experiments you might want to try, thoughts on future projects, etc.
Meetings should have a goal, and focus both on short-term progress and also longer-term goals. Relatedly, I want to ensure that you come to meetings prepared with some key items to discuss. Too often we have meetings that could have been an email, which I do not find are a particularly good use of anyone's time. Instead, you should plan ahead in an effort to make the most of the hour we have. Similarly, each meeting should cover more than one area: immediate research progress, writing progress, long-term goals, etc. Many of you want to talk mostly about immediate research progress and how to make that better and frequently rely on me to press you to think about what experiment might be next, when your going to make progress on writing, and non-imminent deadlines. Especially for those of you who are past your comprehensive exams, you should always keep one eye on longer-term progress. This point is also related to project management and keeping your roadmaps up-to-date; more on that point later.
Meetings should be proceeded by a project/roadmap review. I have written at length about how I review my ongoing projects at the end of every week; see also my expansive blog post on the subject. This process makes sure that I'm making steady progress towards my goals. In my weekly review, I look over each of my projects and “motivators” to determine if I am making the sort of progress I want or, in the event I am not, what additional tasks or goals I should add if I am to meet my targets. Breaking up a big project, like writing a research paper, into small manageable pieces is an important skill, one that requires constant practice. The purpose of this review is to deepen your understanding of your rate of progress and to stimulate idea growth.
Before our meeting, you should conduct one of these reviews. I expect fully going though all of this will take 1–2 hours. Set aside that time, update your roadmap to reflect recent progress, synthesize your last week of progress into an update, make sure you are meeting your progress milestones, and set new progress milestones as appropriate. During the review, ask yourself introspective questions like the following:
An exception can be made when a deadline is imminent: you understandably won't have time to perform this sort of deep introspection with a conference deadline only a week or two away.
Meeting prep should happen the day before we meet. Most of you prepare our meeting notes in he 15 minutes before we meet. This deprives you of the deep thought that you should be going through. As mentioned above, you should treat the meeting prep process as an opportunity to review your projects and find opportunities to accelerate progress and work through new ideas. Doing this sort of review the day before ensures that you'll have flexibility to spend more time on project review if you feel you need it or check of any tasks you may have forgotten about.
I will begin meetings by reading through your Notion meeting note. If you've completed the weekly project review (discussed above), you probably have some short writeup(s) about your progress over the last week. These should not be very long, as I think it will likely not be a good use of time to ask that you write lengthy updates every week, but summarizing your progress—including where you're stuck and what you hope to accomplish next—will help to focus the meeting and ensure that I can best help you make progress, both on near-term experiments or developments and on long-term goals.
Meetings will conclude with setting goals for the next meeting and for the next few weeks. I will admit that I occasionally have a hard time not being the one "on the ground" conducting the research as I did when I was a graduate student. As such, I find myself regularly thinking about very low-level details about the code, occupying my mind and preventing me from focusing on the lab's high-level direction and vision without ballooning the amount of time I spend on work every week. Establishing clear milestones with you about what you will be focusing on between meetings will help me put those details out of my mind, since we have both agreed on what sort of progress we hope to make during that time. Goal setting will help to ensure that we are on the same page in terms of research expectations and, if the goals are not met, you should have some reason/hypothesis as to why it could not get done in the time we thought was reasonable.
Immediately after our meeting, consider creating the Notion page for the following week. Since the meetings are more regular, you can create the page well in advance of the meeting. I also often want to add reminders to those pages for things I want to discuss with you (including administrative "stuff"), only practical if that page already exists (since otherwise we often end up with duplicates).
Prioritize pinging me only when you need feedback or guidance. I appreciate being sent project updates! However, I don't always have much time to study or respond to things that don't require my feedback. Many of you are tempted to share good results because you're excited about them and I want to encourage that! Instead of sending it just to me, consider instead sharing those results to the /whole lab/ via a shared channel on Slack. That way, you get to update everyone (including me) and celebrate your work, and I don't get as many direct messages and can check the shared channel as I have time. Relatedly, this will motivate you to provide relevant context when sharing updates, a good habit to get into.