This post responds to familiar advice about completing a draft early enough to revise it. The advice is sensible. The post asks why so many graduate students know it and still do not follow it.
My answer at the time was that many graduate students enjoy reading, fieldwork, argument, and ideas but do not enjoy writing. Treating the problem as poor scheduling misses the lack of practice and interest underneath it. The phrasing is sweeping, but the distinction became important in my later work.
Related: Writing is the thinking · The good-enough draft · Research Musings (2014)