Question: how would you change your method if you didn't have 3 hours to spend every day on pure, focused learning? What if you didn't know how much time you had, or if you had time at all, and your time came only in very small bursts of free time?
When I was at the university I had all the time in the world for learning, and I was (artificially) incentivized to learn and retain a lot. Therefore my learning method was really different, rich, deep, optimized for the available time and the broad task.
Since I started working, my free time has shrunk by ~90%, and all the incentives for understanding deeply anything have gone to nearly 0. Now I can't afford having a big time slot just for learning, and I changed myself from being engineered to learn and retain theoretical knowledge in bulk to just be able to learn on the fly only the things that I need to use (this has been a positive change, actually. It was a painful change but I realized university had me optimized for something useless for practical purposes).
More and more I'm not even trying to retain in any way the small bits of knowledge, documentation, etc., that I encounter. I just read something up, I use it, and I forget it. For example, sometimes I program in programming languages that "I don't know". I just read up the syntax for the constructs I need, search stuff on stack overflow, and then forget everything.
Before being able to consider applying your method as a learning method, one has to overcome the time scheduling problem of finding 3 straight hours. Your blog has a "Why I wake up at 5 a.m." entry. I suspect that's what makes it possible for you in the first place?
Maybe, but how many people actually read the whole thing? Personally I'm almost exclusively here for the comments and rarely ever click into a link. Maybe that makes me a bad internet citizen, but I don't think it makes me unusual.
Personally I'm almost exclusively here for the comments and rarely ever click into a link.
On HN, I often take a look at the comments first, to get a feel for whether the linked material is likely to be informative or thought-provoking. If there is an interesting discussion starting or if there is a submission that is getting lots of upvotes yet few comments (as this one was when I first saw it this evening) then that's usually a good sign.
FWIW, I've just spent well over an hour reading the article here all the way through, following some of the links to further pieces by the same author and others, and thinking about the ideas. It was probably the most interesting material I've seen all week.
Thanks for linking this. I've been reading through it and I've found it very interesting and somewhat inspiring so far. I'm especially interested in his suggestion to use Anki to memorize things in your personal/social life, past events, and hobbies. I might look into these more creative ways to use Anki as a tool for establishing long term memories of things that are actually important to me.
How do you answer your Questions at the start of the next session? Are you answering based on learning that occurred since the question was written or are you looking up the answers? If the former, do you roll Questions forwards until you are able to answer them?
Hey really enjoyed your post! I was hoping you could expand a little on exactly what sort of things you write in the second file. Are you writing down every "on topic" thought that floats through your head, or are you mostly writing down thoughts after reacting to something prompted by the thing you're learning? The example you have seems to be more the latter, i.e. stuff like "Now let's fix this spaghetti in the render method".
Is there a particular reason why you use 3 files instead of one where you (for example) prefix question lines with a Q and random thoughts with a T? It seems to me that the cost of constantly context switching between files might get in the way.
No particular reason; I have a shift+[ shortcut in Drafts that makes the switch between recent files almost instant. I’ve done both and ended up sticking to a separate file with questions.
Follow up: How do you quickly import the questions that you write in the plain text file into Anki? And how do you organize information into different decks?
I have one deck only because of mixed practice (ref: https://youtu.be/cwaWHeyK_aM). As for import, it sucks. Currently I just copy & paste them on my iPad.
