If you don't throw the bloody chemicals together, but keep simulating them (either by imperfect knowledge (computer based or not) or limited imagination), you don't merely run the process a gazillion times slower.
It's much worse than that.
You get it completely WRONG.
This is not a matter of opinion.
It's basic common logic.
generally true, so long as one isn’t preparing diazomethane... someone once told me that a week in the lab saves an hour in the library. That being said, bench work is more fun than book work, and sometimes the only way to proceed is by getting the gloves dirty.
If you throw the chemicals together, then make notes, spend time thinking about what exactly happened, what you could have done differently, and then re-run the experiment - over and over and over again - then you'll learn, and you'll be a proper chemist.
But von Pechmann died at only 52. That's highly suspicious.
Luckily OTB chess seems less dangerous and I shall follow the advice.
I can recommend the book by either Watson or Crick (I forget), describing more or less their years leading up to the unveiling of DNA. It involves next to no frozen fact based elements. It was basically a matter of sticky tape lego-play and endless trial and error, sauced up with a dash of educated guessing and deduction ("ok, there's this hydrogen bridge, so the molecule can't be this or that shape, etc.)
There's even a girl in the story that made very important contributions with her roentgen diffraction work and went largely unrecognised for it, as it sometimes goes. Rosalind Franklin.