Much of my research is done online, where developing some kind of strategy for managing my time has been essential in preventing me from losing days to endless surfing.1 I’ve also felt far less guilty when I stopped assuming that everything that I read or spent time on should feed back into my current projects. The simplest part of my strategy reads like this: read, share, move on.
In practice, it works like this: if a site is worth remembering – will I want to read it or refer to it again next month? – then I bookmark it with delicious. If it’s interesting right now but seems unlikely to be of use or interest again, I share it on twitter. There’s a healthy degree of overlap, but I’m normally able to decide instantly where to store it. If the page is useful and relevant right now – an article for a paper I’m writing – then it’s referenced and the browser tab stays open for as long as I’m using it.
- Or getting lost in the wikipedia labyrinth, where one quite interesting thing leads to another quite interesting thing until it’s dark and you’re cold and hungry, and there are wolves [↩]