Software to plan lab experiments

Question

I am searching for a (free) software to plan lab experiments. These experiments can stretch over several days but only need attention on some of them. So the feature I am searching for is to define groups of events that can be moved together in a calendar. For example, I would like to enter Mo:Planting, Wed:Harvesting, and Thur:Analysis. If I move planting to Tuesday, the other two should move as well. Ideally this would be a plugin for thunderbird lightning, but I couldn't find anything. Does anybody have an idea?

Answer 1

Almost any project-planning software or plug-in should be able to do more-or-less what you want.

Enter Planting(Monday) as your first project task.

Harvesting would then be constrained to start two days after, either by making Planting duration two days, or if the software is flexible enough, by a simple constraint. Microsoft Project can do this, I suspect that other similar systems can, but have no direct experience.

Do keep in mind the weekend, and what behavior you actually want. If you were to move Planting to Thursday in your example, does Harvest begin at T+2 calendar days, i.e. Saturday, or on Monday? Again to use Project as the example, you set that up by determining the "working" days, which can indeed be set to seven days a week. By making it five days per work-week, it would push to Monday instead of the simple time-based Saturday.

Good Luck