3 ms·

I agree with this, I have read the theory for context sake but it has already been done. I'm building/using an instrument - that's where my focus is during the

• bowsamic 4y ago
  Yep. Scientists need to learn to differentiate between what needs to be done, and what they want to do. Many are woefully bad at estimating what needs to be done, and therefore they spend many hours doing what they want to do with the stressful mindset that it is something that needs to be done. It happened to me a few times, it happens to everyone to some degree, but the sooner you get a good compass for what you need to do the far smoother your life will be. My personal example is when I was doing a theoretical project that had a very intense pure mathematical underpinning. I thought I needed to understand it, but my supervisor kept saying "just work through examples that you know the solutions to". I could have spent 100s or even 1000s of hours learning all this pure mathematics but actually if I would have done so it would not really have helped me today. Instead I just needed to do a few simple examples, which took maybe 20 to 40 hours? And then I was basically done with the research and could write the paper. Maybe if you ask some they will say "you didn't really do it, you didn't know the theory, you were just pretending!" but in the end I got the work done that I wanted to get done, and then went and had a beer.