"I just need a bit more information"

This is the most respectable reason for another lap, and sometimes it's true. So it's worth having a way to tell when it is.

Anthony Bastardi and Eldar Shafir ran a set of studies on what they called the pursuit of useless information. They gave people decisions with a piece of information missing. The missing piece looked relevant. But when other people were given the same decision with that information already supplied, they chose the same way whatever it said. It made no difference to the choice. Even so, the people who lacked it often chose to wait for it, and wouldn't decide until they had it.

There was a second finding, which I find more unsettling. Having waited for the information, people then used it. They made choices they wouldn't otherwise have made, on the strength of a fact that wouldn't have mattered if they'd had it at the start. Once they'd waited for it, they treated it as important.

You can see both halves in the spreadsheet. In October you spent two evenings finding out what garden designers earn in their fifth year. The figures you found ranged so widely that they told you nothing. Course dropped by half a point anyway, and the drop came from the two evenings of worrying more than from anything you found.

There's a simple test for whether a piece of information is worth waiting for. Before you look for it, ask what you'd do if the answer came back one way, and what you'd do if it came back the other. If you'd do the same thing in both cases, you don't need it. If you'd do different things, then it's worth having, and you should go and get it. Usually that means a phone call or an email, and an answer within the week. You'd ring the college and ask how many of last year's students are now working in the field. Reading around the subject until midnight won't tell you that.

There's also a kind of information that can't be found at all. How you'll feel on a wet Tuesday in the second year, after a day at work, with a planting plan due. Whether you'll be any good. Whether the work will be there in five years. No amount of reading will tell you, because the answers don't exist yet. They'll come from doing the course. You can spend years looking for facts of this kind, because the search never turns up empty. There's always another forum thread or article, and another person's story, and each one feels like research.

So when you catch yourself about to start a lap in search of information, write the question down first. Make it one sentence with a question mark. Under it, write who could answer it and by when. If you can't write the question, or nobody could answer it, then the evening you're about to spend won't be research. It'll be another lap.