>My spouse is a lab scientist, and I've seen her meticulous notebooks. She was telling me just last week that one of her experiments produced a puzzling result. The next day she said: "I figured it out from my notebook. I skipped a step that was in the procedure."

This puzzles me. If you are skipping a step in the procedure, aren't you also possibly going to skip writing a step down? And if you're not sure you wrote the exact right steps down, how are you going to use the notebook for that purpose?

What if you have to do several steps rather quickly? Say adding a particular chemical, then waiting for ten seconds and adding, another chemical? Do you have time to write it down?