Flow Cytometry Core Facility New Year's Resolutions

It's that time of year again when the gyms are packed and weight-loss commercials air continuously.This year, why not turn you attention towards your core facility and come up with some resolutions the whole lab can take part in. The best part is you'll have help from the rest of your lab mates to keep you on task.

So, just as we do with our personal lives, allow me to present an ambitious 10 resolutions for the UCFlow core facility. Presented in no particular order, I give you:

1. I'd love to devote more time towards taking better care of our instruments, in terms of routine maintenance and a more streamlined QA process across the board.
2. Do a better job getting administrative tasks like billing/invoicing/usage tracking/usage analysis done on-time and with greater regularity.
3. It's always nice to see how the work done in the core fits into the bigger picture, so I would like to go to more of my user's talks on campus.
4. It's pretty clear data analysis is a hot topic these days, so I want to focus more attention on complex data analysis solutions for users (is R worth it?, try more advanced stuff in Cytobank or FlowJo?, etc...)
5. Who can't use more/new instruments. You'll get none of the instruments you don't write a grant for. I think I need to be more aggressive in my pursuit of new funding sources for instrumentation.
6. Blog more often (a perennial resolution for me).
7. I'm convinced that the Hangouts on Air that we do in the Cytometry Community on Google+ are super useful, and so I'd like to turn that into a more regular thing. 
8. I've always thought that eventually core facilities would collapse into each other to create mega technology centers. But, before that happens, I would like to start by increasing interactions with other core facilities on campus to see what they're doing and what's new in technology in other fields.
9. It use to be the rule in our core that if you went to a meeting, you had to present something. I haven't been as faithful to that rule as I would like, so I'm bringing it back.
10. Of course this last one happens all the time, but I would like to focus some attention on re-evaluating facility costs with greater scrutiny to determine where reductions can be made.

Well, there you have it. I just hope I'll be able to hold onto these longer than my annual attempts to get back "in shape." How about you? Any resolutions you'd like to add for your core facility? Leave a comment.