first time posting here - how much of your PhD was actually science?

i've been talking to a lot of researchers lately and the same thing keeps

coming up. nobody is slow because the ideas are hard. they're slow

because the stack around the ideas is held together with tape.

a normal week looks like:

- 40 tabs open, 12 PDFs in downloads named 2301.04729.pdf

- zotero decides today is the day it will not sync

- overleaf compile times out, you delete a figure to make it build

- the journal wants a different citation style, so now you redo citations

- a co-author sends back a .docx and all your equations are images now

- reviewer 2 asks for one extra analysis and you lose nine days

none of that is science. that's logistics with extra steps.

and the weird part is every piece of it has a tool, they just don't talk

to each other. your reading lives in one app, your notes in another, your

citations in a third, your writing in a fourth, your figures in

illustrator or biorender, your data somewhere you'll regret. switching

between them is where the time actually goes.

AI was supposed to fix this and mostly it added a sixth app that writes

paragraphs you have to fact check anyway. great at sounding like a paper.

useless at knowing whether the claim is true.

so, genuinely asking:

1. what's the dumbest thing that has eaten a full day of your research

2. if you could delete one step from writing a paper and it just happened

by itself, which one

3. has any AI tool actually saved you time or did it just move the work

somewhere else

i want the specific stories, not "tools should be better". tell me about

the day you lost.