Keeping up

Some time ago, cjwatson and siderea asked:

it generally seems that working scientists have to spend a sizeable proportion of their time keeping up with other people's research, since after all that's at least theoretically the point of publishing in the first place and unless you're a genius in a tiny field you'll get further that way than by ignoring everyone and striking out on your own! But scientific publications are generally pretty information-dense and there are a lot of people publishing in most fields, so I'm guessing that just keeping up with your reading could use up all your time if you let it. What strategies do people use for selecting out the most important things and keeping the firehose of incoming information under control?

It's a good question, so let me give it a go, albeit belatedly. I'm not sure I can talk about what strategies people in general use, only what I do, but I don't think I'm that much of an outlier.

( work nerdery )

Does that help? Please feel free to ask more questions, including the rest of my readers beyond the ones who asked me in the first place.