I came across the following quote reading Mersenneary's guide to
HUSNGs. I don't even play HUNSNGs, but there is some good general poker
thought in here. Here's a quote that stood out for me particularly:

"In
academia, you often get scrutinized on the following question when
requesting funding for your research: How could your potential findings
lead to meaningful changes in your field? Similarly, when thinking about
the game from a professional mindset, if the question you are asking
does not imply a way to make money from the answer, be careful about
whether to use your time asking it."

When we are studying poker,
posting hands, etc, how do we know that the hands we are posting and the
questions we are asking are actually important? Generally speaking,
thinking about any poker situation should benefit our game, but our time
is a limited resource. So how do we ensure that those things that we
are working on are actually the things that will benefit us the most in
terms of cold hard profit?

I remember a few years ago being OOP
and getting 3-bet was a really big deal. We had picked up a hand we
really wanted to play, made our raise, and then the dreaded 3-bet
arrived. All options seemed pretty terrible, we liked our hand too much
to fold it, calling had us check/folding a lot of flops, 4-betting
turned our pretty hand into a bluff, etc. These spots were discussed
over and over because they felt important. In reality, perhaps they
didn't really occur quite as often as we imagined and their effect on
our winrate was fairly negligible. We may have given it too much
attention because of its emotional impact, as opposed to its actual
monetary importance (I could also be wrong about this example and it
could actually be more important than I suspect, but bear with me).

So
my question to you is, how do you determine what spots are actually
important in your progress as a poker player? How do you know what will
impact your winrate the most? How do you make sure you are asking the right questions, the ones that will actually lead to meaningful changes in your game?