When going off on a tangent from your regular area, where, presumably, you have such mastery of all cutting-edge research from your routine reading that you hardly need to do any extra (if this is false, please correct me), how much do you try to familiarize yourself with that area before beginning to directly attack your problem? Do you read just a few canonical papers and surveys, look thoroughly over a dozen and glance at a couple dozen more, or do enough to write a whole survey article of your own?