While writing an article for a conference on cooperative information systems, it took me ten pages to come to the conclusion that I did not know what I wanted to write.

This in itself is worrysome, since it can either mean that I do not have enough grasp on the material that I want to publish, or that the material is simply not there. After carefully re-reading the pages that I wrote, I decided to rearrange the structure of the paper a little and I switched the second paragraph with one that was close to the end. Suddenly, it made sense again!

By pouring my thoughts onto paper into a structured format, I realised that my conclusion was really an introduction, and vice versa. A valuable lesson!