Broad strokes
Notebook
Every research guide recommends keeping a notebook. For all your daily ideas and your experiments, it should store everything.
Every 1 or 2 weeks, I do a review, where I read all of my daily entries and I condense the information into a summary. Usually my review contains sections for experimental findings, insights (which might come from me, my colleagues, or things I read), code progress (what did I implement), and next steps / future work. After I do my week in review, I often look at the previous week to see if I followed up on everything I thought of that week.
I’m starting to think that the key part about having a notebook is simply paying attention. It’s a bit like the chicken and the egg, carrying a notebook where you have to fill X amount of pages a day forces you to simply pay more attention to the world.
Misc.
Your scene and environment matter, a lot. If you’re looking for people to talk papers with, or work with, or bounce ideas off of, you make far more progress in a good group. You can try to make up for this by yourself, but it is a challenge.
Goals vs idea research is interesting. Whether you’re just iterating on an idea or if you’re trying to achieve some lofty goal.
Roughly three things: Keep your life in check (exercise, meditate, etc.), do research and keep track through a notebook, and constantly learn (textbooks and reimplementing)
Tension
So, something I’ve been thinking about the tension behind Hamming’s notion of how to do good work and Feynman. Feynman got sick of physics, played around with plates spinning for curiosity’s sake, and then ended up winning a Nobel Prize off that research. Hamming on the other hand was extremely focused on what are the biggest problems in your field, and why aren’t you working on them?
I think there’s probably some balance here. You want to constantly keep the most important questions in mind, but then work on what’s fun while seeing if anything you’ve done could maybe apply to the important questions. What’s cool is that although Feynman was playing around, eventually, his mind went back to the groundbreaking research he had been working on previously. Perhaps you just need to see things in a new light?
Don’t die
One of the key things here is from the startup world and Paul Graham’s essay How Not to Die. I’m curious if this applies to research. If you write down 10 questions everyday, 2,000 words minimum, and run 1 experiment, will you have a good career by the end of it? What are the metacognitive things needed to do good research, and is it, much more about persistence then it is about small spurts of activity?
I know that I’ve felt the most creative in my life when I’ve maintained writing and reading habits in my life, and perhaps that is how you get the flywheel spinning. Something to think about.