I wrote "I don’t research anymore" in my notebook. Which is a funny thing to write. Kind of clickbait I made for myself.
But it’s true, more or less.
Early in my career in education, I’d have the inklings of an idea and immediately go dig into thirty articles. By the end, my idea had basically become their idea. I’d consumed enough research that my original thought got absorbed into whatever the existing thinking was. I couldn’t tell what mine was anymore.
So I stopped doing that first.
Now when I have an idea, I let it sit. I think it through in my own weird vacuum before I look anything up. Sometimes for a week, sometimes longer. Then I do some lightweight research — I’m not writing journal articles here, I just want to know if I’m in the ballpark. And every once in a while I find out that what I thought was original is a variation on something that already exists. Which is fine. That’s usually how ideas work.
I do the same thing with AI. I avoid using it early in the process for the same reason — I don’t want it pulling from research I haven’t vetted and nudging my thinking before I’ve had a chance to develop it myself.
The downside is a lot of half-baked ideas that probably have better-researched versions out there I just haven’t found. I’m okay with that tradeoff. At least when I finally get to the research, I know what I actually think going in.