How the Choice of Tools Speeds up Your Work

Time is precious. Not only monetarily, but especially in terms of everyday life. Managing your work as effectively as possible to reach your goals without being stressed all day long is very important. If you reach your working goals, you can leave work happy and enjoy your free time without taking the stress home and having unresolved issues on your mind. Multiple ideas to increase working efficiency exist in the laboratory markets today. We want to show some ideas to improve your work life and empower you spend your free time feeling more relaxed.

Time-saving work approaches do not always mean that you must rush. Speeding up does not need to mean a reduction in quality of results or reproducibility. If an intelligent decision is made on which tool to use to improve work, speeding up happens automatically. Ideally, reproducibility and result quality are also increased. Furthermore, it is desirable to simplify the steps needed to accomplish the results. This starts with the individual skills of the employee. Since pipetting is the most used technique in labs, a good pipetting technique saves time because experiments do not need repetition caused by inaccurate pipetting.

It makes sense to invest in a pipetting seminar for all employees. This ensures a consistent method of working amongst all employees and ensures that assays are done in the same way no matter who is pipetting. Additionally, thinking about the solutions used and the optimal tool for pipetting these can reduce waiting time e.g. when glycerol is used. Glycerol as a viscous liquid that has a bad flow behavior and is difficult to pipette because one must wait a long time until it is aspirated or dispensed. Even after waiting, it won’t be an accurate pipetting result. So choosing a direct displacement tool facilitates, speeds up, and increases accuracy when working with this liquid.

Figure 1: The systematic measurement deviation increases when a pipette is not held vertical and the immersion depth is too deep during liquid aspiration. This results in higher volume than actually set on the pipette and constantly wrong pipetting results. When dispensing liquid an angle of 20-45° with contact to the vessel wall is recommended.

More and more companies are using robots for their routine work. This does not necessarily mean that less employees are needed, but rather that the kind of work employees are doing is shifted from manual work e.g., pipetting, to more of a programming and monitoring function. This guarantees that robots are working correctly and reduces the employees’ workload. It also offers the spare time needed to prepare other experiments, write reports, or improve assays. Furthermore, programming electronic devices speeds up work. An electronic pipette that can be programmed for dilution series can be 10 times faster than a manual pipette where the pipetting volume must be changed after each dispensing step.

As you can see from these examples, many ways exist to speed up work without being rushed. Improvement of pipetting skills, consideration of the correct tools, and an open mind towards electronics improve your everyday working situation and can help to clear your mind from time-consuming repetitive tasks.

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