Matthew Partridge wonders where does a shorter working week leave that staple of the lab, the weekend experiment. Probably increasing by a day…
Recently there has been much discussion about rolling out the flexible four-day working week and moving away from the more rigid Monday to Friday, 9 to 5 structure. Now while this impacts all kinds of employment, work life balance and productivity aspects of working, it will also impact one of the often forgotten aspects of the research week; the weekend experiment.
The weekend experiment is, for those not familiar with the idea, an experiment that you setup on the last day of the week to run over the weekend while you do normal non-experiment weekend things. This is distinctly different from experiments you have to go into the lab to run over the weekend as these aren't weekend experiments, but just unpaid overtime working the lab (sadly this will unlikely be reduced by the introduction of a four-day working week).
Now weekend experiments are a vital part of practically any research project for a lot of reasons including the factory next door is closed so there are fewer vibrations, or the air handling works better with fewer people so the temperature is more stable (both of which are real reasons that people have given for weekend experiments). But the two most common reasons for running weekend experiments are simply time and people.
Running long experiments on the weekend, away from people, nicely separates things
First off, weekend experiments are a golden opportunity of time. Research projects have a lot of moving parts and layers to them and are rarely a sequential series of experiments or a series of identical-length experiments. Weekends are an opportunity to run the longer experiments at a time when they won’t block equipment from the shorter experiments and also won't use up valuable researcher time. As nice as it is to get paid to play Two Dots on your phone while some equipment goes ‘hummmm’ I think most researchers would admit it is not really very efficient.
Secondly, the greatest threat to a long experiment is people. Don’t get me wrong people are still key to research and, despite some worrying developments in AI, irreplaceable, but people have a bad habit of touching things and experiments have a bad habit of breaking if you touch them, the combination is not ideal. Sometimes the touching is just the ’check’ on something, others it's co-workers that just need to borrow this one bit and they're sure you're not using it. In both cases, the effect on a long-running experiment is often the windows error noise or a worrying “CLUNK”. So, running long experiments on the weekend, away from people, nicely separates things.
Of course, there is always the downside with weekend experiments that the longer they take to run the longer the time there is to potentially waste when you forgot to check the box marked ‘save data’ which you sadly don’t realise until after the weekend. Or as in one memorable case where I forgot to release the manual laser shutter on an experiment I left running for a week. But sadly, the only solution to that downside is more competent researchers and that is far too difficult an issue for this short article to solve.
For the weekend experiment, a four-day working week would be more like the introduction of an extra experimental day. Rather than reducing the output of data we might see a lot more papers with experiments run for 72 hours rather than the traditional 48. So, bring on the four-day working week as longer experiments is more data and I’m pretty sure more data is always better, right?
Dr Matthew Partridge is a researcher, cartoonist and writer who runs the outreach blog errantscience.com
