Lab Communication Rules

Clear communication keeps our meetings focused on strategy rather than logistical untangling. Companion pages: Lab Expectations and Starting a Project.

Weekly updates

Every Friday, write a short update in your Project Landing Page — the project’s Google Doc that serves as its single source of truth (Starting a Project shows the full structure) — then send it as a brief email to the lab list with a link back to the doc. The doc is the archive; the email is the broadcast. Focus on what was accomplished or learned, not what was worked on. The template (traffic-light status adapted from Ben Kuhn’s notes on project management):

Week of [date]

Status: 🟢 on track / 🟡 at risk / 🔴 blocked
What changed / what we learned: two to four bullets of key findings or decisions.
Up next: the next de-risking step — the task that attacks your biggest remaining uncertainty (see the research loop in Starting a Project).
Landing page: [link]

Put the traffic light in the email’s subject line (e.g., [Project name] — week of [date] 🟢) — it lets everyone triage the inbox at a glance, and a 🔴 subject gets a same-day response. And remember the bullets state what was learned, not what was worked on: “ran simulations” is not an update; “the estimator is biased when cluster sizes are informative” is.

Keep the email under ~150 words. If it takes longer than ten minutes to write, you’re writing too much.

Slack vs. email

Slack — rapid iteration. Quick clarifications, daily coordination, unblocking. Rule of thumb: if it can be resolved in under five minutes or unblocks you immediately, it goes in Slack. Post in the project-specific channel rather than DMs, so the whole team benefits from the shared context.
Email — formal and external. External collaborators, grant logistics, scheduling, university administrative matters, and the Friday broadcast above.

1:1 meetings

These are for strategy and for discussing the implications of your results — not for walking through raw output. Come with a short agenda and an updated Project Landing Page. If your RMarkdown or notebook is clean, we spend the hour on what the results mean; if it isn’t, we spend it untangling, which is a worse use of both of our time.

Meeting notes

I use Granola, an AI notetaker, during Zoom 1:1s and lab meetings. That means our meetings are transcribed and summarized; I share the result