Broad strokes
Notebook
Every research guide recommends keeping a notebook. For all your daily ideas and your experiments, it should store everything.
Every 1 or 2 weeks, I do a review, where I read all of my daily entries and I condense the information into a summary. Usually my review contains sections for experimental findings, insights (which might come from me, my colleagues, or things I read), code progress (what did I implement), and next steps / future work. After I do my week in review, I often look at the previous week to see if I followed up on everything I thought of that week.
Misc.
Your scene and environment matter, a lot. If you’re looking for people to talk papers with, or work with, or bounce ideas off of, you make far more progress in a good group. You can try to make up for this by yourself, but it is a challenge.
Goals vs idea research is interesting. Whether you’re just iterating on an idea or if you’re trying to achieve some lofty goal.
Roughly three things: Keep your life in check (exercise, meditate, etc.), do research and keep track through a notebook, and constantly learn (textbooks and reimplementing)