
Ask HN: Researchers/academics, how do you deal with brain-information-overload? - logancg
I&#x27;m wondering how you manage thinking about many different not-well-formed ideas in your research process.<p>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.
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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

