Duration: Can take up to 1 hour. 

Activity:

•  Read the complete paper. 
• Ignore details such as proofs or equations. 
• Take some notes at the margins of the paper and write down the key points.
• Look at any type of illustration in the paper like tables and fig...

Goal: To get the big picture of the paper 

Duration: Less than 10 minutes.

Activity: Glancing over the following sections of paper: 

1. Abstract
2. Title
3. Introduction 
4. Conclusion

Ignore the content of section and sub-sections. 

Srinivasan Keshav describes the three-pass approach which acts as a filtering system. It is an iterative and incremental way of reading a paper. It consists of: 

1. The First Pass: The bird's-eye view 
2. The second pass: Grasp the content
3. The third pass: Virtually re-impleme...

Doing a literature survey is a bit different than reading a single paper. 

1. First pass: In the first pass you have to collect potentially useful papers. Find 3 to 5 recent papers. You can now continue with the usual first pass procedure. You can also skim through the references...

• Pomodoro Sessions: If you feel intimidated by the paper and lack motivation, you can use the pomodoro technique. Start a 25 minute timer without any expectations and read the paper. 
• Feynman technique: Choose a concept you want to learn; pretend you'...

Duration: Can take up to 4-5 hours if you're a beginner(you should carefully consider if this step is worth your time). 

Activity: 

• Read the paper in its entirety and question every detail.
• Make the same assumptions as the authors and re-create the work from scratch. You ...