Probably the best thing my Bruce, my graduate school advisor, taught me was to always ask myself; how is this going to contribute to a paper.  It’s the major product of us academics, and probably the most important way we communicate our results.  Of course, not every experiment we do is going to end up in a publication, but before you do them, stop and ask yourself a few questions.  Is this adequately controlled, or have we done enough repeats to be significant?  Often we get wrapped up in wanting to see the result we expect that we can forget to test for negative or alternative results.  Try to think of your experiment from the eyes of someone reviewing you paper; you can even write out potential final results for each scenrio, and discuss them with your advisor or coworkers to make sure you have it it mind.

Now to steal from glengarry glen-ross, always be writing!  Start writing the paper immediately; put that first result in a figure, write up the methods in all it’s gory detail, and start sketching out how you interpret this result with previous results.  I found this out the hard way while writing my first paper, when I waited until I thought I had all the results.  As I started putting together these results, it became clear to me that there would have been a number of other experiments I would have made a priority if I had only thought about it in context.  

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