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Keeping good notes is essential for all sorts of activities, ranging from scientific research to the arts.

Maintaining good notebooks is essential for almost any activity, ranging from scientific research to the arts. How else will you remember how to cook your favorite homemade dishes? Writing notebooks is part of a much broader endeavor: the creation, documentation and propagation of knowledge.

Virtually all employers in the fields of science and engineering require employees to document their activities through the generation of internal reports, patent applications, presentations, papers in trade magazines and scientific journals, etc. Laboratory notebooks are the basic source of information for most of these forms of communication and dissemination.

Employers require good documentation for a number of reasons, including securing intellectual property, keeping projects on track, reducing training and knowledge transfer time, complying with regulations, etc. But you should see that there good reasons for you to do it anyways: among many other benefits it will minimize time wasted, and it will show that you are a professional - someone who cares enough to write down and analyze what he or she does.

Here is a slide deck that I have used to show the basics of laboratory notebook keeping to both graduate and undergraduate students.