I think everyone here knows the general formula for improvement: do problems that are not too easy and not too difficult for you. Now, when implementing this in practice, one comes across the very difficult and often-asked question, "How long do I try before giving up and looking at part of the solution?"

I have seen various answers for this question, ranging from days to hours to once where I saw some red guy advocate for 5-10 minutes. It seems as though the median time I've seen advocated is somewhere around 30-45 minutes.

But the 5-10 minutes comment got me wondering: has anyone ever tried using a time threshold of 0 minutes? As in, you just read problems that are not too easy and not too difficult for you, and just immediately look at the solution, try to understand it, and implement it? And then repeat this for say, 20-50 problems, and recalibrate what is too easy/too difficult by competing in contests? Intuitively it feels like the progress should not be as high as if the parameter was 30-45 minutes, but it would be interesting to hear whether anyone has done this, and what the results were.