The research lifecycle · Lesson 1 of 3

The stages, and what finishing each one looks like

Each stage has a finish condition. Not knowing yours is the most common reason work feels endless.

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Define. You arrive with a topic and leave with a question, plus the reason it is worth answering and the limits of what you will cover. Finished when you can say the question in one sentence and name what would answer it.

Discover. You find what already exists. Finished when new searches mostly return things you have already seen — which is a real, noticeable moment, and the only honest signal that you have covered the ground.

Read. You work through what you found, deciding what is relevant and what each source actually says. Finished when you can describe the shape of the literature: who agrees, who disagrees, and where the arguments are.

Extract. You pull the specific evidence out of the sources in a comparable form — the same questions asked of every source. Finished when you could answer "what did all of these say about X" without reopening them.

Analyse. You do something to the extracted evidence: compare, synthesise, test, count. Finished when you can state what the evidence supports, and how confidently.

Write. You communicate it, including what you are unsure about. Finished when somebody else could follow your reasoning and disagree with it on specific grounds.

These map exactly onto the stages a project carries in this product, which is not a coincidence — the workspace was built around this shape.

See it happen

Three weeks into a project, you have read a lot and feel you are making no progress.

The read that arrives on its own

You conclude you have not read enough yet, and go and find more papers.

The same situation, with this idea

You ask which stage you are in. You can list your sources but not say who disagrees with whom — so you are not finished with Read, and more sources will make that worse rather than better. The next move is not searching; it is going back through what you have with one question in hand.

After this, you can

diagnose a stall by asking which stage you are in rather than assuming the answer is "more".

The takeaway

Each stage has a finish condition. Not knowing yours is the most common reason work feels endless.

Easy to take the wrong way

That you must complete each stage before touching the next. You will move between them constantly — the point is knowing which one you are in right now.

Try this

Name the stage you are in on your current project, and write its finish condition in one line. If you cannot, that is the stage you are actually in.