Ask HN: Researchers/academics, how do you deal with brain-information-overload?

[logancg]

I'm wondering how you manage thinking about many different not-well-formed ideas in your research process.

I find the academic research lifestyle highly variable: at times too dense with ideas and things to do, at other times less so. During the dense times I sometimes have trouble lingering on the few high-value ideas with increasing returns to time-spent-thinking-about-them.

[Top19]

Put your notes in OneNote, and divide them into 4 or 5 high-level categories (1000,2000,3000, etc). Then split those thousand groups into hundreds groups, tens groups, etc. Something magic happens to your brain when you start using numbers to group things. Not sure what it is, but overtime you’ll find yourself using the number and not even saying the title anymore. Also having dedicated buckets for things relieves a tremendous amount of anxiety. It takes a while to build and it’s incredibly an unintuitive thing to build out, but it really helps. Check out schemes and the top level pages on wikipedia, or maybe various classification systems.

So for example btw:

1000 - Liberal Arts

  1100 - Philosophy

  1200 - Law

2000 - Natural Science

  2100 - Chemistry

3000 - Applied Science

  3100 - Agriculture

  3200 - Engineering

    3210 - Mechanical Engineering