The Lab Chores Scientists Secretly Love

Behind every experiment is a long list of routine lab work: refilling tip boxes, sorting samples, cleaning benches, and labeling tubes. While these tasks may seem tedious from the outside, they often bring a surprising sense of calm and accomplishment during stressful days in the lab. Curious to hear which tasks resonated most with researchers, The Scientist asked readers: What’s a mundane lab task that you actually enjoy?

Marwa Zafarullah, postdoctoral researcher, Stanford University

My favorite mundane task is aliquoting samples from our research participants. There's something almost meditative about the repetition of moving between each tiny tube representing a patient who trusted us with something irreplaceable. For a few quiet minutes, the whole complexity of a multi-omics study distills into me, the pipette, and the sample.

Ruth Isenberg, postdoctoral associate, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

I genuinely enjoy doing mundane chores, like putting caps on culture tubes, racking pipette tips, and unpacking lab supply shipments. When I need a break from thinking, I’ve also been known to start organizing refrigerators and freezers!

Rishi Jaiswal, postdoctoral fellow, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences

One mundane lab task I weirdly enjoy is aligning pipette tip boxes after a chaotic experiment—it feels like restoring order to the universe one tip at a time. I also find scanning colony formation assay plates oddly satisfying, especially when the colonies decide to grow in aesthetically pleasing patterns instead of scientific chaos.

Sudheesh Allikka Parambil, associate research scientist, Yale University

Every couple of weeks, I thoroughly clean my workspace and lay down a fresh bench protector. It makes me happy!

Georgia Lattanzi, postdoctoral researcher, Salk Institute for Biological Studies

I am an early bird, so I am usually in lab by 8:00 or 8:30 a.m. when there are not many people yet. I make my hot coffee, and there is nothing I enjoy more than spending my first hour checking the latest discoveries and reading a few papers and headlines about the immuno-oncology world. Every morning I go through the scientific press and authors' literature to see what's new or how some eminent scientists have shaped their career through their discoveries. It is a ritual that mixes some inspirational approaches with the newest discoveries and gives me the excitement to dive deep into my research. We often minimize the importance of reading science and being up to date with the literature, but going forward in the academic career I think that's one of the key winning factors.

Umar Sheikh, postdoctoral researcher, University of Wisconsin-Madison

I enjoy the simple routine of wiping down the workbench at the end of a long day. It feels like a satisfying reset and a clean close to my work. I also like refilling tip boxes, as it gives me a moment to slow down, rest my mind, and step out of the intense, active focus required during experiments. These small tasks help me recharge while still contributing to an organized lab environment.

Kishore Narasimhan, postdoctoral researcher, Texas A&M University

Refilling pipette tips is my guilty pleasure in the lab. It is the one task where the result is immediate, visible, and not dependent on antibody specificity, animal behavior, or whether the cells decided to cooperate that day.

Plus, there is a quiet pride in knowing that someone in the lab will open the box and think, “Wow, civilization still exists.”

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.