Thrashing, Process, & Productivity

How you do convince people to pay attention to their experiment development process?

Everyone makes mistakes. The art of productive science is making and catching mistakes at the right time and place, the best time is the design phase and the best place is on paper. Design time and paper are relatively cheap.

Thrashing on a paper during the design phase is not as exciting as collecting the first data or analyzing the data which supports a pet theory. I created a process which slows me down to catch mistakes of rushing forward. Part of that process is the drawer trick from Stephen King's On Writing.

When I am developing a new study, I design it from start-to-finish on paper from data collection to final analysis with mock figures. I print it out and put it in drawer. I completely forgot about it, that takes ~3 weeks for me. When I revisit the study, I have more detached viewpoint. I catch more mistakes that I care to admit but those are the cheap mistakes.

This process of early thrashing increases later productivity.