One of the harder aspects of the nature of the research I am carrying out now is the length of time between the initiation of an experiment and the results. This is not all that bad when you know an approach is working and all you are doing is repeating experiments or just varying the conditions but the same techniques are involved. But when you are working out the bugs in a technique you have to wait until you have the results before you begin the next experiment so you can determine what conditions you have to vary next. That is the stage I am in now. With committees and teaching it is even harder.