Lab Elf — the scheduling app I wish I'd had during my PhD

Wet lab research is a peculiar kind of chaos.

You're running four experiments simultaneously. One needs to incubate for two hours, one has a gel running, one is waiting for a PCR to finish, and somewhere in there you're supposed to be writing, reading papers, grading undergrad lab reports, and showing up to a department meeting you forgot about.

The researchers who thrive at this are the ones who've internalized a kind of mental Tetris. They know instinctively how to slot experiments together so dead time becomes productive time. But that skill takes years to develop, burns cognitive energy even when you have it, and completely falls apart the moment life gets complicated.

I spent years in a wet lab. I'm an organized person and it was still hard. For friends who were less obsessive about their lists and schedules, it was genuinely overwhelming, and that overhead contributed to exactly the kind of chronic stress that makes PhD programs so brutal.

When I started building software, this was one of the first problems I thought of, because I really lived it.

Enter: Lab Elf, to the rescue.

You tell it what experiments you need to run this week by typing, voice note, photo of a printed protocol, or URL. It parses the steps, understands which parts need you and which parts are just waiting, and builds you an optimized weekly schedule that intelligently interleaves everything.

While your western blot gel runs, the app already has you scheduled to grade a lab report. While your PCR runs, you're making the buffers for the enzymatic assay that's up next. Shorter gaps get filled with something useful or restoring: a task from your list, or an intentional break (a walk, a coffee with a colleague, ten deep breaths, whatever actually helps you reset).

It also handles the things that make wet lab scheduling genuinely hard: multi-day protocols that span weekends, live cells that need attention every 48 hours, shared department equipment that might already be booked. Connect your department's Google Sheet signup and Lab Elf won't schedule you on the confocal microscope when someone else has it.

The app remembers your lab's specific rules and workflows over time through a simple chat. Tell it "I never transfect cells less than 24 hours after passaging" once and it never makes that mistake again.

Hebrew and English supported. Built with researchers in Israel and the US in mind.

Currently in development, if this sounds like something you would have used during your PhD, or something you need right now, I'd love to hear from you. Looking for honest feedback, beta testers, etc.