Habits

So I’m working in the lab and all the rotavaps on my side of the lab are busy so I go to use the one on the other side. The two on my side are both hooked up to a chiller, but the lone one has a dry ice trap. As a result, this is distinctly the third choice and is not used as much. I’m first to use it today and it needed dry ice, but the water in the bath was low too. So I got a big beaker to refill the bath, added some water. It wasn’t quite enough so I head back over to my side of the lab and refill the beaker to add to the water bath, even though there was a sink right next to the water bath I was filling. So why didn’t I use that sink?

In a word, habit.

It got me thinking about habits and our routines and how we do things.

I am, to an extent, a creature of habit. I like my routine. I see it as a mental check list that gets everything done. If I stray from my usual routine, I might forget to turn on the chiller (for example) which delays the first evaporation of the day. We have by an iterative process worked out the most efficient way to do things on a daily basis. The problem with this is when something disrupts the program, so being able to adapt to the unexpected is necessary, but as chemists working with the ever fickle world of organic chemistry, most of us are used to that as well.

But it occurred to me that the habits are helpful in another way, an important way when doing laboratory work. When things go wrong, you are already doing things right. This is where good habits pay major dividends. That goes from wearing your protective equipment even when you aren’t doing anything particularly dangerous and keeping your lab area clear so a spill doesn’t escalate. Of course, this is also when bad habits come back to bite you, those things you’ve always done and got away with. Adding extra hydrogenation catalyst to push a reaction to completion might be something you can do on a small scale, but when you do that on a multi-gram scale, you have a fire. And if you have a ton of solvent sitting around in your hood then suddenly you have a bigger fire. And if you didn’t bother putting your lab coat on to do this quick little thing, suddenly you have a big problem.

Another good habit to get into is putting things on your blog regularly. Opportunity (or just making the time) has been tricky the last few weeks, but as I believe the song goes, a good habit these days is hard to find.