ELN hygiene and the searchable lab
Lesson 3 of 6 · Running a group
1 · Learn the move · Specific task + easy yes
The searchable lab is not a policy achievement; it is an artifact achievement. Asking a model for 'an ELN policy' produces five pages nobody reads. Asking for one page - an entry template, a naming convention, and five tagging rules - produces something a lab meeting can adopt by Friday, and adoption is the entire game: the value of a notebook system is what the lab can find in it two years after its author graduated. The specific-task move is deliberate: small enough to say yes to, concrete enough to enforce by template rather than memory, and the template does the enforcing - a student filling in headers does not need to remember the convention, because the blank fields ask. Scope the request to the artifact, and hygiene stops being a nagging problem and becomes a form-factor problem.
One page, three artifacts, for a lab of [n] people using [ELN platform]: (1) an entry template - headers every experiment entry gets (aim link, date, protocol version used, deviations, raw-file locations, next step), (2) a file and sample naming convention with two worked examples, (3) five tagging rules maximum. Constraint: adoptable in one lab meeting, enforceable by template rather than memory. No policy prose.
2 · Your turn. You write the prompt
A student who graduated in May is unreachable in a new time zone, and the past week has been spent reconstructing which of four similar runs produced the frozen aliquots in box 7. The lab meeting is Thursday. You want to walk in with one page, not a policy, and leave with adoption.
Remember: the AI sees only your prompt, not this page. If the situation isn't in your prompt, it doesn't exist.
Optional. These shape the output when you run your prompt below, not your score.