I find it useful, when using the above techniques, to take time from time to time to consolidate all the gathered information, make sure there are no conflicts, and take note of any obvious gaps in my knowledge.

Do you do this in writing, or mentally?

For preference, I do that part via text-based conversations, which I don't usually refer back to. If that's not an option, I usually do it mentally. I do the parts that involve short, repeated bursts of thinking entirely mentally, which acts as a kind of natural spaced repetition. Between that and my natural tendency to use visualizations to keep track of things, I do well enough that getting into the habit of keeping and referring to notes seems like more trouble than it would be worth in most cases. I have been playing with Evernote, though, and might wind up developing some note-taking techniques that are compatible with this.

Can you give an example of how a conversation "drifts" and is pulled back with your techique?

Sure, here's an example that's been on my mind recently: As I mentioned, I'm working on a post about instrumental rationality, in which I'll present my own situation regarding health and medical care as an open problem and ask how I should go about determining what actions to take. I already wrote a paragraph explicitly stating that I'm not interested in actual medical advice, but I fully expected to have the following exchange even so:

LWer: You have [medical issue]. I know someone who had that issue, and you should do [thing] for it.

Me: The advice is noted, but that's not the point of the post; how should I have gone about determining that that is the right thing to do, given that LW is not an appropriate place to ask for medical advice?

(My prediction for the likelihood of the above exchange, or one substantially similar, was .85 or so before I decided to use it as an example here; writing about it obviously reduces that, but I still predict a likelihood of about .3 - we're not good at resisting the temptation to other-optimize.)

Or how it looks when you don't need to?

The best answer to this is going to be an example, since conversations like this just look normal and sane to me (and the common kinds of conversations don't look sane). I'll dig one out of my logs, but I'll need to get permission before I post it, and that will take a while.