[Question] As an independent researcher, how do you stay or become motivated, productive, and impactful?

See companion question here.

As a researcher in a nonprofit, I often have trouble focusing and executing on the most important tasks. I think a bunch of things help about being in a org helps: ops support, having a manager and others to source contracts for research problems that are relevant for improving specific EA decisions, weekly checkins with a manager, collaboratively set milestones, daily slack updates, having a slack where I share ideas, reviews of my early drafts and other docs by coworkers, having coworkers to challenge and debate theories of change, and I’m sure a number of other things I’m missing.

Presumably both I individually and my org institutionally are still falling far short of what we can do, but it seems like being in an institution is helpful for me. And of course not everybody benefits from being in an institution, and I’m sure many people are much more productive without one.

So I’m broadly interested in how independent researchers (or semi-independent researchers like grad students with very absentee advisors) manage to maintain (or get higher) on things like motivation, general productivity, and setting really good/​impactful research goals.

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