It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done. (Samuel Smiles)
Not every idea leads to a success, and not every first draft forms a good template for the final draft. This is true even for the very best mathematicians.
There are times when a project just isn’t working the way it was initially planned, and you have to scale it down, refocus it, or shelve it altogether; or a lemma that you spent a lot of time on turns out not to add anything much to the paper and has to be reluctantly jettisoned or deferred to another paper; or that the structure of a half-written paper is clearly not optimal and that one needs to rewrite the entire thing from scratch. (Indeed, some of the papers I am most proud of are virtually unrecognizable from their first draft, due to one or more complete rewrites.)
One has to know when one should be persistent and patient, and when one should be pragmatic and realistic; stubbornly working away at a dead end is not the most efficient use of your time, and publishing every last scrap of your work is not always the best way to meet the standards of quality you expect from your publications (though sometimes it is still worth making your partial successes available in some format). Of course, in today’s digital age it is cheap and easy to backup all your work, and you should certainly do this before performing major surgery on any paper.
Even an embarrassingly wrong piece of work (and I have a number of these, which fortunately have never made it as far as publication) should be stored privately somewhere, because you never know whether something salvageable can be extracted from it, and also it is good to make a note of mistakes that one should avoid in the future. For instance, it can help you learn the limitations of your own tools.
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7 August, 2008 at 11:42 am
On time management « What’s new
[…] There are also many situations in which it makes tactical sense to defer, delay, delegate, or procrastinate on any given task, and go work on something else instead in the meantime; not everything is equally important, and also a given task may in fact become much easier (and be completed in a much better way) if one waits for one’s own skills to get stronger, or for other events to happen that reduce the importance or need for the task in the first place. My current papers on wave maps, for instance, have been delayed for years, much to my own personal frustration, but in retrospect I can see that it was actually a good idea to let those papers sit for a while, as the project as I had originally conceived it was a technical nightmare, and it really was necessary to wait for the technology and understanding in the field to improve before being able to tackle it in a relatively civilised manner. [Perhaps this very article on time management is an example of this, also. There are also a number of other draft articles hidden in this blog that I felt were not quite working at the time, and are awaiting some further inspiration to complete; it seems that not every idea or topic for an article necessarily leads to a viable end product; cf. “use the wastebasket”.] […]
8 August, 2008 at 5:43 am
我如何安排时间(译自陶哲轩博客) « Liuxiaochuan’s Weblog
[…] 而在另外的一些情况下,却反而可以对一些任务进行推迟,延误,甚至去做些其他的工作。并不是所有的事情都同样的重要。而面对一个给定的任务,如果一个人等到自己的技能更强悍,或者是发生了某件事情使得这个任务变得不再那么重要,那么这个工作显然就变得简单了。比如,我目前关于波映射的论文( papers on wave maps)被延误了好些年,主要是因为我自己没能坚持。然而回想起来,我看到把论文放在那一段时间也有不错的方面。当初我计划中的方法和在技术上简直是个噩梦。真的很有必要等待合适的工具出现,等待对这个领域的理解的加深,然后在对问题有更深刻更有效的处理。 [也许这篇文章本身就是一个很好的例子。在我的博客中,还有很多的文章草稿我觉得还不成熟,至少现在还是不是露面的时候。它们还在等待进一步的修改。并不是所有的想法或者话题都能够顺利完成,变成一个有意义的结果,参考我的另一篇“利用垃圾箱”。(use the wastebasket)] […]
11 December, 2009 at 1:26 am
Advice::Use the wastebasket « What’s new : On the 8 Spot
[…] via Use the wastebasket « What’s new. […]
20 January, 2011 at 8:01 am
我如何安排时间(译自陶哲轩博客)[转载自刘小川WordPress] | 宇宙海洋™
[…] 而在另外的一些情况下,却反而可以对一些任务进行推迟,延误,甚至放下去做些其他的工作。并不是所有的事情都同样的重要。面对一个给定的任务,如果 一个人等到自己的技能更强悍,或者是发生了某件事情使得这个任务变得不再那么重要,那么这个工作显然就变得简单了。比如,我目前关于波映射的论文( papers on wave maps) 被延误了好些年,主要是因为我自己没能坚持。然而回想起来,我看到把论文放在那一段时间也有不错的方面。当初我计划中的方法在技术上简直是个噩梦。真的很 有必要等待合适的工具出现,等待对这个领域的理解的加深,然后在对问题有更深刻更有效的处理。 [也许这篇文章本身就是一个很好的例子。在我的博客中,还有很多的文章草稿我觉得还不成熟,至少现在还不是露面的时候。它们还在等待进一步的修改。并不是 所有的想法或者话题都能够顺利完成,变成一个有意义的结果,参考我的另一篇“利用垃圾箱”。(use the wastebasket)] […]
15 March, 2011 at 6:56 am
liuxuewudi
[…] 而在另外的一些情况下,却反而可以对一些任务进行推迟,延误,甚至放下去做些其他的工作。并不是所有的事情都同样的重要。面对一个给定的任务,如果一个人等到自己的技能更强悍,或者是发生了某件事情使得这个任务变得不再那么重要,那么这个工作显然就变得简单了。比如,我目前关于波映射的论文( papers on wave maps)被延误了好些年,主要是因为我自己没能坚持。然而回想起来,我看到把论文放在那一段时间也有不错的方面。当初我计划中的方法在技术上简直是个噩梦。真的很有必要等待合适的工具出现,等待对这个领域的理解的加深,然后在对问题有更深刻更有效的处理。 [也许这篇文章本身就是一个很好的例子。在我的博客中,还有很多的文章草稿我觉得还不成熟,至少现在还不是露面的时候。它们还在等待进一步的修改。并不是所有的想法或者话题都能够顺利完成,变成一个有意义的结果,参考我的另一篇“利用垃圾箱”。(use the wastebasket)] […]
3 April, 2011 at 5:48 am
我如何安排时间(译自陶哲轩博客)- (转载自Liu,Xiaochuan的博客) « What's new
[…] 而在另外的一些情况下,却反而可以对一些任务进行推迟,延误,甚至放下去做些其他的工作。并不是所有的事情都同样的重要。面对一个给定的任务,如果一个人等到自己的技能更强悍,或者是发生了某件事情使得这个任务变得不再那么重要,那么这个工作显然就变得简单了。比如,我目前关于波映射的论文( papers on wave maps)被延误了好些年,主要是因为我自己没能坚持。然而回想起来,我看到把论文放在那一段时间也有不错的方面。当初我计划中的方法在技术上简直是个噩梦。真的很有必要等待合适的工具出现,等待对这个领域的理解的加深,然后在对问题有更深刻更有效的处理。 [也许这篇文章本身就是一个很好的例子。在我的博客中,还有很多的文章草稿我觉得还不成熟,至少现在还不是露面的时候。它们还在等待进一步的修改。并不是所有的想法或者话题都能够顺利完成,变成一个有意义的结果,参考我的另一篇“利用垃圾箱”。(use the wastebasket)] […]
7 March, 2012 at 12:52 am
On time management (From Terry Tao’s Blog, What’s new) | shuiruge's blog 水如歌的博客
[…] There are also many situations in which it makes tactical sense to defer, delay, delegate, or procrastinate on any given task, and go work on something else instead in the meantime; not everything is equally important, and also a given task may in fact become much easier (and be completed in a much better way) if one waits for one’s own skills to get stronger, or for other events to happen that reduce the importance or need for the task in the first place. My current papers on wave maps, for instance, have been delayed for years, much to my own personal frustration, but in retrospect I can see that it was actually a good idea to let those papers sit for a while, as the project as I had originally conceived it was a technical nightmare, and it really was necessary to wait for the technology and understanding in the field to improve before being able to tackle it in a relatively civilised manner. [Perhaps this very article on time management is an example of this, also. There are also a number of other draft articles hidden in this blog that I felt were not quite working at the time, and are awaiting some further inspiration to complete. It seems that not every idea or topic for an article necessarily leads to a viable end product; cf. "use the wastebasket".] […]
9 December, 2012 at 2:25 am
[Skills] Làm việc chăm chỉ – GS Terrence Tao | Nguyen Hoai Tuong
[…] Nếu bạn cảm thấy chán với một việc nhỏ, hãy thử làm việc lớn hơn rồi sau đó quay lại. Có nghĩa là cần linh hoạt trong việc quản lý thời gian sao cho phù hợp với […]
16 November, 2014 at 6:14 am
El Tao de la productividad | Homo Minimus
[…] Use the wastebasket […]
2 August, 2021 at 8:49 am
Assessing Abandoned Research Projects – People First Math Second
[…] be learned from the experience after the fact. While Terence Tao has discussed the importance of “using the wastebasket” from his extensive experience, I want to talk about why projects may fall apart part-way through […]