My Research Process: Key Mindsets - Truth-Seeking, Prioritisation, Moving Fast

I'm loving this series so far. I got two questions if you've got some time to answer them.

What categories do you use for time-tracking? I find research tasks unusually hard to categorize.

Do you find that earlier stages in the Ideation -> Exploration -> Understanding -> Distillation pipeline take more time to get good at? My experience is that I improve at later stages far earlier and far faster than earlier stages (passable at Distillation before Understanding, passable at Understanding before Exploration, passable at Exploration before Ideation). And anecdotally, I heard people can take a very long time to come up with a good research idea.