The messiness of my lab got so painful that I couldn’t do experiments easily . I would be demoralised by the effort of searching for things, or clearing up my desk every time. This made me less likely to do experiments after a tiring day at work. But given my schedule, not being able to do experiment on any free evening is extremely costly to me, since free evenings are scarce. And so maximising the probability of being able to do experiments in the free time I have is important. After all, I am still doing science outside my day job. So, I spent a few hours reorganising things into different shelves to do with their purpose, like temperature, probes, and glassware . And then I spent a bunch of money on IKEA furniture. And then I spent like 4 hours building the shelves and desks, with my lower back hurting from bending over and screwing things. Before: After: But in the process of cleaning up my lab, I kept a list of every component or piece of equipment that I had.…