The SARS CoV-2 pandemic -caused research ramp-down period was a weird time for me / the lab. I sent Sarah to work from home for 10 or so weeks, meaning I had to do the lab work myself if I wanted to make any progress on any of the existing grant-work, or for any of the SARS CoV-2 research I was trying to boot up. This has resulted in some VERY long weeks over the last few months, as I was really trying to do everything at that point. Cognizant of this, I even started timing myself doing some of the more routine / mundane tasks, to see if I could try to maximize my efficiency. Perhaps the most consistent / predictable of the tasks were minipreps. In particular, I was curious whether doing more minipreps simultaneously saved me time in the long run.

So short answer was yes. 24 is a very comfortable / logical number for me (I just fill up my mini-centrifuge, and the result is divisible by three so easy for processing as complete 8-strip PCR tubes for Sanger later on), and I consistently processed those in about an hour. Dong fewer would be somewhat less efficiency, though sometimes you have to do that if you’re in a rush to get some particular clone of recombinant DNA plasmid. Then again, doing more than 24 — while somewhat exhausting — does save me some time overall. Thus, I found out that was a worthwhile strategy to plan for during that period.

That said, I’m very glad to have Sarah back in the lab helping me with some of the wet-lab work again. Not only does it save me time, but also saves me focus; I’ve gotten pretty good at multi-tasking, but I still do hit a limit in terms of the number of DIFFERENT things I can do / think about at the same time.