Notes written in the field are good at recording results and reflections, but keeping the flow that led to those results as structure is surprisingly hard. The procedure that lived only in someone's head at the time, the implicit assumptions that didn't make it onto the page, the judgment calls that got summarized away in meeting decks — when you read the notes back years later, those rarely survive together. I felt this myself. More than ten years after stepping away from active experimental work, I tried to recall the flow of one of those experiments. What I had left were fragmented notes and a few meeting decks. The results were there, but the flow that led to them had thinned out over time. There is a methodology that says: write the procedure as a flow chart in your notebook. Even so, notes written in the field tend to be results-centric, and keeping the flow recorded as structure on top of that takes more effort than expected.…