Starting my PhD and keeping my lab notebook in org-mode!

Org mode has, and still serves me well throughout my PhD. Best of luck to you!

I read it all and have some questions and ideas. I would like to know more about your org workflow to generate this information and suggest possible improvements. First, are you using insert note or capture to generate these notes? Second, a possible “improvement” that I have noticed you could use relating to tracking the time when the flies were moved to the next plate is that, org supports the tracking of state changes “todo” items, using the exact same syntax you do (#A to #A1), except it’s automated. This first major downside of this is that it would require that you have many todo states, one for each plate, but this could simply be the numbers 1-max plates … 9? The next biggest benefit of this is that these todo state changes can be logged into a drawer. What this would allow you to have is a headline for say vial A or batch A of flies with a drawer below it that has all of its state changes in it that can be minimized. Like the following: * Flies A: :LOGBOOK: This would free this heading to allow you to write additional notes or research about this batch of flies here, yet also be able to view or extract the data relating to this batch easily and then fold back the raw data when not needed. The other feature this would give you is you could go to this fly batch heading and, hit C-c C-t and then the plate number, say 2 and it will automatically advance the state, write down the times it was input into the state or out of the state and it would update the batch heading with the number of the current state to look like this: * 2 Flies A :LOGBOOK: - 2 from 1 [2020-10-8-6:25] - 1 from [2020-10-7-5:40] :END: The last thing this would provide is also the option to provide a note during the state change and those notes show up in the logbook with the state change time stamps. So you can easily see notes associated with going from plate 1 to 2 if you had any etc. They would show up just under the state change times. I assume you know how to set this up but I also could share the required setup, if this is a feature you want to implement. I’ve written all of this on my phone late at night but am heavily considering rewriting all of this to be more concise to portray how useful this could be for you, with the actual syntax and code blocks if need be to demonstrate what late night descriptions can’t. Please let me know what you think.

I think you should also look [org-roam](https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam) and [org-roam-bibtex](https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam-bibtex/) (I can't configure org-roam-bibtex properly because I'm on Windows).

I assume that this document will be exported to a pdf or other format - and I am not sure whether logbooks will show up there 🤔 The ideas you gave are pretty useful though, emacs always has this trap of over-engineering one’s own workflow where the setup takes much more time than the time saved by, e.g. the automation. At least for me it’s always a gamble..

> Huh, this post looks oddly familiar is what I thought before I discovered that OP was simply trying to farm karma by reposting something that u/curious_neophyte had shared [a little over a year ago](https://reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/nq9qgs/starting_my_phd_and_keeping_my_lab_notebook_in/)

Pretty sure this is another repost bot.

i’ve been scooped! haha

Wow that makes me so disappointed. I’ll have to send the real author my suggestion below…

is this a reason a user can be baned from a reddit?