Accuracy and personality - how the two very different things are related

Lab meeting presentaion done! It was a hectic week with lots of meetings, studying, and analyses. I should have started earlier! I always feel so, but I don't learn the lesson because I somehow manage to get it done... The good thing about giving a presentatioin is that you can omit information that you don't fully understand or too much detail. You can decide what the highlight is. That's good! After that, I spent a good 3-4 hours in the greenhouse starting to plant our F1 seeds. There are total 1200+ seeds, and We will need 400 pots. We are going to have the nightmare of tangled, out-of-control plants again for the next few months....

Also coming up the next few months are:

• Midterm exam, presentation topic, term paper interview for the food science class;
• Write paper of bean paste;
• Genotype, diversity analysis for conference presentation;
• Image analysis using computational approach;

There's this much time a day, this much time a week; I really need to think carefully how I spend my time. Time is life. There's only so much time and prioritisation is key.

In that sense, it makes sense that people just stay at work till 5 and rush home afterwords, however much work is remaining, because their time dedicated to work is just 8 hours. It's not about the quality, and it's not a norm that you would need to stay however long until you finish. It's about how much you can do within the limited amount of time, and if you cannot wait till tomorrow, you will need to hire another person. I have a mixed feeling about that attitude because I think quality of work is important. If you rush to finish and not check your job, then your work will not be of acceptable quality.

But who is going to check the quality of your work? Because checking will take another person's time. Unless they are hired to do that, nobody won't. Maybe a lot of data generated here are questionable. So many people are involved at one or more points of data collection, and it's not surprising if an error occurs at any point.

It was surprigng to hear that error is possible, and how one does his/her job is a personality thing and cannot be changed. Isn't it possible to do a line of tasks without an error, if you check each time before proceeding to the next? It will require a good setup and easy-to-follow system to do that, but it's possible. I think this is where personality comes into play. Even if there is a system, some people follow it, others don't - they just go with whatever THEY are comfortable. Isn't how a job is done something that is taught and trained? There's no room for personality there. You just follow the steps so that you will get the best result with a minimum error rate. What's more efficient than that??

People are selling time to their empolyer. They do their best, but there's no gold standard of what is good. Some folks just don't care or don't notice small details as much. Team work is tricky because there are various kinds of people in a team with different personalities and strengths. Those who notice little things the most will have to take the leadership, and that is why leadership is so valued here. If you can lead a team, you have a good idea of what is going on and you know what you are doing. If you are a mere teammate, nobody knows if you are diligent, hard-working, detail oriented and accurate, or careless, prone to erros and passive. How do you deal with those who are less careful and have little intention to improve themselves? And how difficult is it to tell the careful from the not careful? A recommendation letter won't help at all because it just says beautiful things. It's more of a formality and it only shows that they worked there. It doesn't say how they did it..