How do you keep track of your learning?
I have a feeling a lot of us here would consider ourselves life-long learners with a growth mindset.
I'm curious how people keep track of their own individual learning. Do you learn in public?
Right now, I don't use any platform other than Apple's native notes app. I created a tagging system for myself and a note structure where I add a reflection at the end of each note. The reflections have been helping me be more intentional with breaking down what I'm consuming and retaining what I'm learning.
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🗺 I have mindmaps. Many of them.
I know people obsessed by the tools / process. I don't really care.
I appreciate this. Thanks for sharing! I find it so valuable to be able to reference articles/ books I've found interesting and may want to reference, refer back to or share.
Not sure if this ever comes up for you, but do you have a place for where you'd put articles that you have not yet read but want to come back to?
Yep. I use pocket for that.
This may sound weird but I take notes but I don't worry about organizing them because I never look at them ever again. I find highlighting and note-taking valuable in the learning process but almost worthless as reference for a couple reasons:
So I take lots of notes on paper, in notebooks, in Word/Google docs to aid in learning. Then I never look at them ever again.
It took me a long time to get to this point. For years I spent time carefully note-taking, archiving and memorizing information – I think because that's how the education system tells us how to learn. But having been out of the education system for a couple decades now... I just feel like that way of learning is so wasteful. What matters to me is not how much information I have in my brain, but rather what is the most efficient way to learn what is necessary to accomplish my goals.
What about abstract knowledge you don't use, but which is useful to know? For example, I'm learning computer science, and the knowledge is very abstract. I can't really use it in a concrete way. Still, I believe that a lot of knowledge is build on top, so it's useful to learn it.
My assumption (I more or less "verified") is: if you learn computer science, you'll learn anything built on top more easily. But, even without speaking about computer science, abstract knowledge (like mathematics) can be necessary to learn other type of knowledge.
In that case, memorizing (or, in more complete way, "understanding it") is useful.
I wrote an article about that if somebody is interested. I think it's fascinating.
Thanks for sharing your article. It has many great points and insights.
I do think learning styles vary quite a bit, and there isn't necessarily a right or wrong way to learn. If it works for you, do it.
Now that I reflect on it, one of the main reasons I don't spend time memorizing information is because I'm severely time-constrained and I find it more efficient to look things up and "re-learn" something when necessary (i.e. just-in-time learning) rather than memorizing. To a large degree, the brain is actually a pretty efficient learning machine... for things that I need or do repeatedly, the brain strengthens those neural pathways automatically. For things I don't use or use rarely, the brain doesn't bother. Memorization, to a certain degree is the act of artificially strengthening neural pathways that you would otherwise not use, which is by definition a somewhat inefficient activity.
I can't remember most of what I learning in school. Computer science algorithms, calculus, differential equations, history classes, organic chemistry, whatever – I have almost no recollection of any of it. However, I do think that my brain is better having learned it. And if I needed any of that knowledge again, I'm highly confident that I could re-learn it very quickly.
Another point that I should make is that I'm at a point in my life where I know what my goals and priorities are. I have very well-developed mental models that I have collected and honed for this purpose. So as I learn new materials, I can quickly build-upon and extend this mental structure. And I can also quickly triage new information and discard things that aren't relevant to my goals. When I was younger, I didn't have clear goals and objectives and I was still exploring what I wanted to do with my life. Learning was much more open-ended and exploratory. These days, my learning is much more practical, purposeful and focused.
Thanks for your reply! That was definitely insightful too.
Some studies were made about that and, apparently, we never forget completely. When we create a path in our brain, it stays for a long time, and it's way easier to reinforce it if needed. I love this idea!
You might want to check out Emberly (https://ember.ly/sapling/bd86fb692e98423d899e322e300030d9/5eda84dc2e5350000105b252?access=public)
It was made specifically for organising your learnings :) I haven't used it myself, but the demo looks super cool! And it's made by fellow indie hackers.
Thanks for sending this over! I like the menu view with the visual of the links. Everything seems to be organized in a hierarchal fashion in the demo. I wonder if there's flexibility for a many to many linking rather than just a parent to child 🤔. Excited to play with it!!
I'm not sure if you can do many to many linking. Maybe @Ginu and @leifross can help you out?
Thanks, @nicolaas for recommending Emberly! ❤
Hi @dardang! There is no many-to-many linking in the map itself, but we are working on a new linking system for the notes editor.
This way we hope to preserve the speed and ease of use of a hierarchy but improve the connection of ideas with the linking inside the notes.
If you have any feature suggestions we would love to hear them! 🥰
Hey Gina! Appreciate the response. I'll definitely send suggestions your way when I get a chance to try it out :)
Hi Darlene, I'm a bit late to the discussion…
I created a product for myself to help me capture the learning process in action.
The convention approach is: create notes and / or capture web pages; tag, and / or shove things into a folder; and then — as I said a while ago — hope that "structure and then knowledge would both emerge of their own volition from cryptic ones and zeros".
The kids refer to it as bi-directional linking, and this is where I've combined the create-capture stage with the curation, where I link to whatever it is I'm working on with whatever's relevant at that moment in time, paying the organizational tax up front.
We use an app called Bear for all of our digital note-taking and James Clear's Habit Journal for our manual entries.
We've tried notion & roam and they're great, but a bit too complex for our already messy minds.
We have plans to build our own app for all the visual & auditory life long learners. Hope to share more info soon! (Hint: video & voice powered)
💙 Learn Stash
@learnstash - just checked out your website! I agree that learning better leads to being better !!
I'm building a product to help introduce people to mental models. They’ve changed my life and have helped me think better, make better decisions, and navigate life with confidence. Happy to connect and see if we can help support each other in any way!
Very cool! How do you like James Clear's Habit Journal? I actually just started reading Atomic Habits the other day.
Hey Darlene! Thanks for sharing. I love mental models and I'll definitely have to feature your product as one of our favorite resources. Looking forward to trying it out!
The Habit Journal is great. I use it every day for everything from notetaking to habit tracking to OKR tracking to simply jotting down funny thoughts & ideas. I highly recommend giving it a try for yourself.
Will keep you updated on when I launch the app!
I'm a huge fan of Roam to keep track of everything I do, and anything I learn. It's a great way to document & make connection between different concepts. I'd highly recommend to check it out.
Ya i'm finding that the ability to link and connect my thoughts between different concepts has helped so much in my learning! When I'm linking different concepts together it helps me reflect. How do you think Roam makes it easy for you to make those connections?
I love this question. Because I just wrote 900 words titled On Learning (and came here for my 10 minute break and saw this haha). I take notes when I consume something long forms, most of these notes are in notebooks (and I don't go back to them, which is okay, there is a lot of research that shows that the act of taking notes and being presents allows for seeping in of concepts). I did start sharing notes publicly this year - the most recent ones are from couple coursera courses - one on the science of meditation and one on learning, incidentally.
Love it! Would love to read On Learning whenever it's ready.
Do you notice if there's a difference between the notes you share publicly vs private notes? I'm thinking about being more intentional with learning in public. I'm using IH as a jumping off point since I feel a little more comfortable in our community.
Hi @dardang - there is not a huge difference between my public and private notes, except that my notebook has more of my shorthand.
And here is what I wrote that day https://bhumimakes.com/learn-as-little-as-possible/
I use my own app to track reading, projects, and Coursera courses.
The #1 problem for me is picking up another thing before I finish the last one. Usually, it's not because I lost interest in the old one, but simply forgot what goals I had set.
As for keeping track of what I learned, I take notes on a notebook.
Hey Terry! Thanks for sharing.
I think there's a lot of value in learning different materials at once. It's similar to reading parts of multiple books at once! But yes i'd say it's definitely connected to what your objective is and what you want out of it.
I usually move on from a learning material if I think i've gotten all the value I could from it, and if it enables me to solve for the problem I was working on.
I consume a lot of content too, from different sources. So a few months ago I created Rumin for myself to help keep track of and make sense of all the learnings.
I have recently shared on IndieHackers a link to something I wrote about one month of learning in public.
I have a digital garden at Aquiles.me, that I organize through Obsidian and a custom program to compile the notes into a browsable website. I have also tried Zettlr, which is an amazing piece of software, but in my usecase it had a slightly higher friction level to just write down notes. Some reflections on notes and specifically about notes on technical papers.
Hey @aqui_c, great notes you have there!
We're huge fans of the digital gardening concept too – we're working on Sagenote, a tool to help organize our thoughts into something that is timeful.
We're launching private beta later this year, but feel free to sign up for early access if you find it promising :)
Maybe... How do you compare to Obsidian or Zettlr?
We're in the same problem space as Obsidian, Zettlr, or Roam, so we share a lot of similar concepts and features.
We care a lot about how the app feels (visually, and how effective it is to work with) – check our design principles where we tried to capture this.
We aim to be more of a learning platform than a bi-directional note-taking tool – to help you learn from your notes, write more, and work with resources you already saved elsewhere. On the other side, we won't be as flexible as Notion or Obsidian are, mostly because of our quite opinionated view on how to work with notes to learn from them the most.
My question was regarding whether you host information offline or online (should have made it clear). That is a crucial difference between Obsidian/Zettlr and Roam. I am not looking for a service for my notes, I want a product with high portability.
I understand now, thanks for clarification :-) In a longer term, we have some online collaboration features planned, so storing files locally would make it harder to achieve.
Anyway, we're not fans of vendor lock-in at all. We'll give our users full control over their data – they'll be able to export all their data as markdown files. That should make it portable to basically any other place.
Gotcha!
Then I guess it is not really for me, but thanks for the hint!
I use an app called Bear. It syncs all notes from my iMac, macbook, iphone and iPad. I pay for the pro version and I'm generally pleased with it. Wish they had more choices for fonts though.
Ahh gotcha. Thanks for sharing! Do you find it easier to organize with their hashtag linking system?