Bundle it up and send it off
[Working in a statistical working group during the second world war] was a very important move for me, partly because I got to work with Jimmie Savage, and partly because I learned to work with problems - real problems - quickly. Problems came in and they always had a deadline on them, and I learned that you had to do what you could, and then write it up and send it off because it wasn't going to be of any value later. That was a marvelous thing for me. Until then most of my statistical research wasn't quite finished or quite good enough to display. After that I learned to bundle it up and send it off.
Francis J. Anscombe (1988) "Frederick Mosteller and John W. Tukey: A
Conversation" Statist. Sci. 3(1), 136-144. https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ss/1177013020
The principle of 'bundle it up and send it off' is also a fundamental
feature of agile programming. I think this is another piece of evidence
that we should apply agile principles to the process of research.
The Google+ URL for this post was
https://plus.google.com/+MatthewBrett/posts/bbesKKnLFv5