- Keep track of your thinking
- What do you know? What do you not know? How could you find out?
- Nested bullets
- Remember what you’ve ruled out and what you haven’t
- Parallel theories, branching thought processes, different lines of investigation - manifest it in writing
- Avoid mental stack overflow
- Avoid losing track of theories if there are too many
- Keep track of dependent thoughts
- “Park” a train of thought:
- As you’re investigating one idea you may think of other ideas/questions, or notice other issues, that might be worth pursuing but would distract from the current investigation
- Write them down - capture what you were thinking, next step if you already know it, but don’t actually start the investigation
- Come back later if necessary. If not (you solved the immediate issue), you can always come back to your notes for this other idea.
- Write down questions as well as answers