How often do you research to get insights, deeper knowledge or validate a hypothesis? How do you research and learn? What are your favourite tools and what are you biggest pain points?
I try to read for at least 45 minutes each day and I take notes on the books I read. From there I move on to the more advanced stuff I gathered and use my old habit of following bibliographic references for more.
Umberto Eco has a book on how to write a PHD thesis, How to Write a Thesis . I think a lot of the techniques described in that book are valuable for any kind of research, whether your aim is to write a thesis or just to learn something new.
These groups have helped me organize my "lifestream" a lot better. Rather than torturing myself about deciding the perfect place for everything I learn, PARA helps me understand that organization is more of a lifecycle with stages over time. Something might go into a project folder today, but when that project is complete (or abandoned), its parts can go into reusable resources, mini-brain areas, or the archive. That fluidity has made filing of information a lot easier.
This isn't a full answer to your whole question. But knowing how to deal with the influx of daily information, and developing more of an opinion what a research session's work product should look like, is a piece of the puzzle.
What do we do? There are infinite methods, tools, apps, and only so many hours in a day. Do you just keep trying tools/methodologies till one clicks with you?
(Can't say that it works well for recurring tasks, but that's not Obsidian's fault – that's entirely on me.)
I saw the system as this external thing that if I could get it just right maybe my life would be solved (exaggerating obviously).
Eventually my focus shifted from the system itself, to my interaction with it. I realized that it wasn't about having a system, it was about removing as much friction as possible.
What do we do? There are infinite methods, tools, apps, and only so many hours in a day. Do you just keep trying tools/methodologies till one clicks with you?
It's the same in the productivity world as it is in the programming one. Problems never have a perfect solution and you have limited resources and different bottlenecks. People come up with different things, that work for them, that might not work for others.
You can find interesting things if you overlap Software and Personal Behavior resources
Personal resources: time, energy, friction, memory, agency Software resources: time, computation complexity, memory, business logic
I still apply some slipbox techniques with note taking.
My only challenge now is how to regularly review my notes and update them.
How do you actually organize projects, resources and areas. What tools and systems do you use?
I.e. I started learning Data Science lately (frontend developer here), and I just picked one course and learn each day few lessons. More and more, I'm convinced that these small steps are once that moves you forward whether you are learning something new or going to gym, what ever. Just show up, and do that small step each day.
Everything else will come together. You will need to do some research anyway if you want to 'finish' some task, so I don't bother with that. Just go, and learn.
It also helped me in habit stacking, which led to better productivity too. routines help.
I suspect, much like experiments showing how people prefer/like (Familiarity effect) art they have seen in a previous session (even if months later and they don't remember and can't explain why they like it more than other art!), that students would pick up some correct/incorrect answers, because they can't help but read and notice any interesting differences from their mental model.
I have built an app which prepares exercises for you based on your subject and uses LLM-chosen emojis to represent each exericse. It notifies you with the emoji for each lesson each day with the idea of a visual cue but now you mention it using a dynamic icon for the app might be more important of a visual cue (to get the daily cadence/habit), rather than something recognisable
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration-exploitation_dilem...
I remember learning something akin to this in social psychology in the context of a single risk-taker fish breaking from the school of fish to explore and take risks which ultimately benefitted the whole group.
The general idea is that your agent, however it is training, has to balance trying new things to possibly find the global maxima instead of getting hooked on a rewarding local maxima.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement_learning#Explora...
here an n-gram of the first mentions: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Exploration-ex...
I didn’t research machine learning, but my friends did, so it could have been an idea I picked up from someone else.
Anyway, I think it’s a valuable framework because we need to make time for exploration—it’s a great way to let go, have fun, and dissolve the fear of failure.
Also, the typical framing of the problem is the same "kind" of choice being repeatedly executed (e.g., betting on a coin-flip of unknown bias, or balancing the gain of consumer purchasing information vs exploiting known information when setting items into aisle end-caps in a grocery store). That has a lot more structure than arbitrary graphs, enough so to make it worthy of its own dedicated study (especially given the real-world applicability).
For mechanical things: I was able to learn lazygit keybindings by heart in a week that take care of 95% of my usage.
To remember key arguments of an article: I make a card like
In the article _The Bitter Lesson_, what types of methods work better in the long run?
General methods that use computation (search/learning)
Is there anything that this tool is lacking atm?
Learning and research is something you(someone) has to impose on themselves as a self-discipline(like working out, eating right or some other habit). I learned this early in my adolescent years- but it was not honed or realized until university. Once I got into college, I found out that I need to push myself to do the research for things I wanted to pursue- even if it wasn't directly related- in order to achieve my end goal. In comparison, as a naive kid- I would research hitboxes, best shooter tactics and related gaming notes. Now, I open myself to anything and everything- because I realize now 20 years later, that I can easily make what I learn into something I benefit/enjoy from with enough effort and perspective insight.
Long-story-short(tldr)?
Just because you don't know something now, doesn't mean it won't be important to you later. When that day comes, the last thing on your mind will be passive interest- and moreso long-term passion. Which, in retrospect- the former is the dopamine calling you home to stay placated with who you are- rather than you want to be.
Read a book. Save a life. -Chuck
The key is de-fragmentation, which is the most important discipline in this age. Read serious publications by professional authors. Stay away from any traffic-driven information. I can't say they are 100% rubbish, but spending time on them causes far far more damage than gain.
Define what you want to do. Then start working on that. Embrace a top-down approach. Learn only on a need-to-know basis. When you need to know something for the app or the paper, learn that. Don't touch anything else. Make a list of stuff that you find interesting.
Always keep the completion of the project in your mind, and nothing else.
Project-based learning/research works the best.
Also allocate some hours per week for goal-free learning. Read/do whatever you want. But, keep it limited.
I have left my full time job this month, and now pursuing full time research independently hoping some papers + job exp. + GRE lands me a PhD in a good research uni.
When you are working, try to make sure that the job aligns with your long term goals. Then learn a lot from work. Learning at work is effortless.
[0]: https://www.kaggle.com/code/truthr/learn-jax-from-linear-reg...
For research, I usually just use a search engine and read what seem to be credible sources. News articles, court documents, studies, etc.
Insights come when I'm listening to music. I listen to music like most people watch movies -- I sit down and actually listen without doing something else at the same time. It's very meditative and it's quite common that I get "aha" moments regarding things that I've been learning or doing.
At least, that's my working hypothesis for now, still testing this out.
Sure I go down infotainment rabbit holes. I justify infotainment as infotainment. I do not pretend it's research.
I've been happier since I stopped making grand plans. Since I got over myself.
Happier since I measured my growth by what I did rather than what I knew.
YMMV. Good luck.
Sometimes I use HN search to look for good threads about a topic.
Joking aside, I worry when I start working again too. I think recognizing that struggling is learning and aiming to get into the rhythm/habit of struggling even when you're tired - even a little bit - compounds. I'm also toying with the idea of cohort-based learning
Whether the trail is familiar or not, but I don't really want to go down any rabbit holes.
I'm not after blood, I just want to come across the rabbit when he's not tucked away too deep and see what he has to say.
I don't read *that* much (for reference: I read 24 books last year; this year 5, so far). Every month I have a goal of how many pages I want to read. This month it's set at 8 pages per day, but usually I go well above that, only going to 8 pages if I'm not feeling like reading that day, which is rarer and rarer.
I also stopped taking notes, it's distracting and makes reading feel like a chore and pretty unenjoyable for me, but YMMV with regards to note-taking.
If I feel like I don't understand something, I will go back and re-read that, or re-read the whole book, multiple times if I have to. By re-reading books, you pick up pieces you missed on your first or second time (or third, and so on) reading them. It's also better to read a single book 1000 times than to read 1000 books one time, something I've learned thanks to Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Speaking of Taleb, he recommends not continuing to read a book if it gets boring to you - to be bored of a single book but not of the act-of-reading-itself-type of a deal. I think that's very smart too. I intuitively did that before I read this recommendation of his.
Did I mention you should his books? Because you should, everyone should.
Instead, I have begun to rely on encyclopedias and spaced repetition, with the idea being that I will actually remember all of the data I’m inputting.
To use an example: I read a popular biography about Rockefeller last year. I can remember the vague outlines of it, but realistically if you asked me to summarize the book, I couldn’t write more than a page. I think most people have a similar experience with reading. Can you name the last ten books you read and write a brief essay about each? Almost certainly not, even if you read a ton.
To combat this, I’ve been adding specific details about Rockefeller to an Anki deck. Things like, “Where was Rockefeller born?” Or “How many companies was Standard Oil split into?” My thesis is that knowing a few hundred facts like this is an order of magnitude more productive than reading a book about the subject. Encyclopedias are thus useful for this purpose, as they present a huge amount of information about a subject in a format amendable for memorizing.
A better example might be related to the Roman emperor Augustus. Memorizing the various events of his life, his personal quirks, and so forth is absolutely going to give you a sense of the man moreso than just reading a random biography about him.
I do agree that a book provides the "gist" of the subject's character, but I think you can get that from watching a 30-minute documentary, not reading a 500-page book.
> All this information is stored somewhere in your brain in some way.. it can possibly be used at some point without you even realizing.
It's a pretty big assumption, if you're implying that we somehow remember everything we read.
In any case, I think the best approach is probably to combine reading a book with specific facts that easily fit into a SRS system. This is something I've been thinking about quite a bit, in fact: how would one design a narrative-based book such that it is more easily remembered? My initial thought is something like this: at the end of every chapter, a list of 100+ specific points made is presented. You could also include a premade Anki deck with the ebook edition.
The full technique is written on this post https://thinkingthrough.substack.com/p/going-down-the-rabbit...
tl;dr
“In my ChatGPT custom instructions, I have instructed ChatGPT to “Give me 2-4 follow-up questions that I can ask on the topic” (⬅ copy-paste that into your prompt ). And the results are marvelous.”