3 ms·
> Or instead of iterating 5 times, you take your time and do it right on the 2nd attempt, figuring it out in 1/3 of the time. Hurrying only leads to mistakes.
by Osmium 9y ago
> Or instead of iterating 5 times, you take your time and do it right on the 2nd attempt, figuring it out in 1/3 of the time. Hurrying only leads to mistakes.
In an abstract sense this is true, but there are some fields were you do just have to do it again, and again, and again. I know an exceptionally smart biochemist who routinely has 16 hour days. There's no substitute.
In my own field, someone who would later go on to win a Nobel for the work, was working on something that simply required a huge amount of time and iteration to get right. This is often the case.
This is not true in all fields, of course. I just want to caution against extrapolating from experience in one field to all PhDs, which is the sense I get from a lot of comments in this thread.
- ABCLAW 9y agoI don't know a single biochemist that puts in 16 hours of work a day. I know of plenty of biochemists that routinely start and end their days 16 hours apart because they have a growth protocol that takes 12 hours to complete prior to harvesting, so they get to the lab, prep, set up the experiment, then leave for a large chunk of the day while their flasks are hard at work, then get in at 8pm to finish the protocol, record results, tidy up and head home for sleep. The above timeline is common and routine as are claims of having just done a '16 hour day' by those who are on the above schedule. I'm not saying biochemists couldn't run 16 hours of experimental protocols at their bench per day, but I've never seen it happen.