My own research flow is to read and consume a lot on the material I'm trying to absorb, then try to put that into some kind of essay, either to others or to myself, once I think I have something useful that's resulted. Then, if I'm working on a larger work, months later I come back and collect the associated works and use them as a basis for a first draft of long-form material.
I had no idea it would get many votes. Frankly, I wanted to share this with another site but whenever I share there, it gets auto-posted here. So I figured I would go ahead and submit here myself if it was going to show up in the feed anyway.
If anybody is interested in carrying on the discussion please ping me! I'm finding it fascinating to develop a meta-model that covers both machine, human, and organizational learning. Not sure that anybody's done that before. So far it's been a hoot.