This reminds me of Simon Peyton-Jones's (of Haskell fame) seminars on How to Write a Great Research Paper: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/academic-pro

This reminds me of Simon Peyton-Jones's (of Haskell fame) seminars on How to Write a Great Research Paper: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/academic-program/write-great-research-paper/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/academic-program/wr... There are multiple slightly different versions of the seminar (another is linked below that one), but unfortunately they all came out after I'd finished my PhD, and I didn't hear that advice from anyone else. The process I arrived at after losing time on failed projects was basically "fail fast": find the simplest quickest way to demonstrate that your idea won't work, and do that. Then find the next simplest, and so on, until either it works or you've proven it doesn't and moved on.