A few weeks ago I had a conversation with Dave Nicholls, where he reminded me of the value of a daily reading habit. I think I read a lot but over time, had shifted my focus to blogs as a way of staying up-to-date with the cutting edge of AI-related research. My reasoning was that you can’t keep up if you’re reading full papers, so I was following people who were providing summaries and overviews. For example, Ben Dickson’s TechTalks, Zvi Mowshowitz, and the editorial team at The Decoder.
Which is fine, if you just want to ‘keep up’ with the news about AI. But there are ideas that need deeper engagement which necessarily means you need to read the papers themselves. I’d fallen out of the habit of reading the original research and realised that I was missing this part of my practice.
I’ve tried this before but struggled to maintain the momentum, possibly because I was trying to do too much. So this time I’ve reconfigured my daily schedule and blocked off a minimum of 30 minutes for reading. And I’ve committed to only saying a few short things about each paper rather than writing a full-blown summary.
I’m hoping to finish at least one paper every week (I’ll read a paper a day but almost certainly won’t finish a paper a day), which I’ll share on a Friday (here’s last week’s paper, for example).
Let’s see how long I can keep this up.