Among physicists “manager” is not the most popular word, albeit that all group leaders are in fact managers. Why this is the case may be more than a blog post on itself, and I do not intend to write that post. Having quite some manager friends, for example in civil engineering or management consulting, I think there is a lot we can learn from them. One thing is the use of Gantt charts, milestones and go/no-go’s. Often people dislike these methods, a representative response is this post from 2008 on this blog.

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When you start your career as a postgraduate student, it is normal that you start collecting your scientific results in a slightly unorganized way. However as time proceeds, some basic rules are needed to keep track of your work. Every scientist has to develop his own systems for keeping organized. Ideally, a minimal set of rules should be used consistently by group members, including staff members and students, to facilitate data exchange. Perhaps some aspects appear trivial, but in my contact with undergraduate and postgraduate students I have seen many shocking examples of (lack of) data management. Here I give an example of how to organize data using a Windows operating system, based on my own set of rules. Again it should be emphasized that this is just one example of an organizational structure, which is aimed at avoiding some of the most common mistakes.

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