Five Reasons You Think You Don’t Need This
I lost most of a year to a filing system.
Not to the system itself — to its absence, and then to my elaborate attempts to build one after the fact. I had the notes. I had read the things. What I did not have was any record of why I had made the choices I had made eighteen months earlier, and so I spent months reconstructing my own reasoning from fragments, badly, under deadline. Every one of those months was avoidable. I did not avoid them because I had never seriously considered that a person of my competence would need infrastructure. Infrastructure was for people who struggled.
That belief cost me a year, and I meet it constantly in other academics, so let me take it apart properly. Here are the five things people say when I suggest they need scaffolding for their research, and why each of them is wrong.
