i hate how mostly every professor wants like a full-fledged abstract or outline for a term paper before letting you start. I get that's for my own safety so I don't end up sinking a lot of work into a paper that was doomed to fail from the start, but i've written a lot of term papers by now and I always did pretty well so I'd like to think I know how to do this at this point. Having to develop a full outline beforehand to me really feels just like a arbitrary extra task I have to do rather than prep for the actual thing, and I'd much rather just start writing and see how my thoughts develop in the process rather than having to nail them down right from the beginning
after having already collected and organized notes for several days, I spent the majority of my energy today writing a formal abstract to send as a pitch to my prof, that I instead could have used to do something that's useful, like actually working on the essay