I personally don't count my writing as research. If it goes straight from idea to writing, without intermediate steps like field work, coding, math, deep prep notes, or experiments, it's not research in my book. Going straight from reading to writing is more like criticism.
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Structuring time for research is far harder than structuring material resources (equipment, lab bench) or space (properly sized/ventilated/lit area for the type of work). Research is a natural time monopoly. It wants to take over all your waking hours.
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Natural monopoly in time is an interesting concept. Language learning is another example. The speed increases superlinearly with time fraction of immersion. That's why actually being immersed in the foreign language country all waking hours is the fastest.
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My material resources state is basically complete. I have all the stuff I need except for a high-powered workstation (not a good time to be shopping for that). Spatially, my spare bedroom is a decent space, but not the best, it's about 12x12 feet, and ideally I'd like 3x that
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But time-wise, I'm not able to arrange my time properly to make progress at the rate I want to. I need time for a) refreshing old subjects b) studying a few new relevant ones c) working on the research proper (I'm thinking here mainly of my rover project, though I have others)
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If mixing in writing (non-research... blogging/newsletter) and consulting work weren't an issue, I'd arrange a grad school like schedule: study sessions, lab sessions etc. on a fixed calendar.
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My study load alone is equivalent to like a 9-12 credit American grad school load. That would be a full load.
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Context switching is brutal among the 3 activities and consulting cannot be batched or made asynchronous beyond a point. You ideally want pure research time in week-sized chunks. Basically impossible for me.
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Replying to @vgr
what’s the reason for not wanting to mix in writing and consulting work? and by mix in do you mean doing both on the same days?
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Today’s research accomplishment: made a cardboard tube pinhole sun-observing thing like in grade school. It doesn’t work very well 😐
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Replying to
Ouch 🤣
It’s a quick mock-up of a more serious instrument I want to build, to get a feel for the design space


