My system of learning

· 1357 words · 7 minute read

The pursuit of continuous learning has been an intrinsic value to me for as long as I can remember. Love of learning also shows up as my top character strength.

In this article, I want to share my system of learning. A simple approach to finding information, capturing knowledge and extracting value. Throughout the text, I share the resources and the tools that enable my system.

Inflow: Finding information 🔗

The first step to learning is to find information. Luckily, there is an abundance of it today.

I am grateful to all those who invest their precious time into sharing their knowledge with the world. The amount of information easily available thanks to the Internet and its contributors is staggering. Humanity’s collective wisdom is at the tip of our fingers.

My steady inflow of information stems primarily from articles, podcasts and books.

Articles 🔗

Newsletters and blogs are awesome because text is such a great medium for information. Easy to organize, store, search and retrieve. Here are some brilliant minds to learn from:

Podcasts 🔗

I love audio as it allows me to gain new insights while cooking, cleaning, exercising, etc. The following podcasts have repeatedly turned chores into valuable moments of learning:

Additionally, I listen to a bunch of Swedish-speaking podcasts, mainly about politics.

Books 🔗

I enjoy reading books and I consume both fiction and non-fiction. There are certainly learnings in both. I think books play an increasingly important role in our busy world. They stand in stark contrast to the operating model of social media. Books have become tools for me to train my attention and deeper thinking.

There was a time when I temporarily fell off the book-reading wagon, and over time I realized how a resistance against longer texts started to build up. Once I got back into my habit of reading, the resistance subsided.

Reading a book is a significant investment timewise, and non-fiction books are often unnecessarily wordy. To reduce the effort, I have tried tools like Blinkist but without success. I prefer the lengthy version. Too much context is lost when a book is reduced to its core concepts and the lack of storytelling makes the knowledge not stick.

Other sources 🔗

I consume the sources above on a daily and weekly basis in a structured and deliberate way. Two other sources where I take less of a structured approach but are still worth highlighting, are courses and communities.

Courses 🔗

I am a person who cherished my time as a student and doing courses is still a way of learning I enjoy. It is not something I do regularly, but on sporadic occasions, I treat myself to something on Coursera or Clearer Thinking.

Communities 🔗

Last but certainly not least. The magic that happens in human exchange. I am thankful to all my friends, colleagues and strangers (there are a bunch of knowledgeable ones over at Rands Leadership Slack) through which I have been gifted countless insights. Turn to thy neighbor and ask, challenge, debate, discuss, and enjoy.

Stock up: Capturing knowledge 🔗

The sources described above provide a steady stream of information. To read everything in-depth and subsequently recall the insights when they are needed would require immense effort. It is not feasible. The approach I take instead is to consolidate and curate the information into a base of knowledge, from which I can later extract value.

My knowledge base has two storage layers: i) flashcards - special-purpose and structured knowledge and; ii) a personal wiki - general-purpose and fairly unstructured.

For the flashcards, I use Thought Saver, a tool where you can create decks of cards to quiz yourself with. The goal is to help you remember what you learn through spaced repetition. As an example, try this deck I made on the nuggets from Kent Beck’s excellent book Tidy First?.

My wiki lives in Notion, where I store links to articles I like and notes of insights, ideas, reflections, and more.

wiki.png

Figure 1. The root level of my wiki in Notion.

So what do the pipelines that feed my knowledge base look like? They all follow the same high-level flow, check -> consume -> capture, with slight variations for each source.

Articles 🔗

Check. I skim the article to make a first assessment. If it does not seem helpful, I discard it. If the article seems helpful and is long (> 5 minutes), I add it to a ‘Read later’ tab group in Chrome.

Consume. If the article is helpful and short (< 5 minutes), I read it straight away. For the saved articles in the ‘Read later’ tab group, I make sure to block time each week to read them.

Capture. After reading, if applicable, I create flashcards using Thought Savers’ Chrome plugin, and I save the link in Notion for future reference, sometimes with a few notes as well.

Podcasts 🔗

Check. I scroll through the new episodes each morning, download those I want to listen to and discard the rest.

Consume. I listen whenever possible, e.g., while walking to work, exercising, cooking, and cleaning the apartment.

Capture. I usually write notes in my wiki while listening. Occasionally I create flashcards too, using the Thought Saver mobile app. This happens seldom though since the process of creating flashcards from scratch in the app involves more effort compared to the Chrome plugin or the Kindle highlights importer (more on that below).

Books 🔗

Check. I collect a lot of book recommendations from the sources mentioned above. The list of books I want to read lives in Notion. For non-fiction books I tend to pick them based on what could help me in my current professional role, to minimize the time to value for my learnings.

Consume. Reading is part of my falling asleep routine, and I read on average 30 minutes every evening. Usually more on the weekends.

Capture. I read most books on Kindle, and Thought Saver has a feature to import Kindle highlights as flashcards. They typically require a little bit of polishing but the overall effort is low. I write down notes in my wiki while reading too but I like the highlights importer since it offers minimal disturbance of the reading flow.

To sum it up, the pipeline feeding my knowledge base is visualized below.

---
title: Knowledge pipeline
---
flowchart LR
    Articles --> check{Check}
    Podcasts --> check{Check}
    Books --> check{Check}
    Misc["Other Sources"] --> check{Check}
    check{Check} -->|Valuable| consume{Consume}
    check{Check} -->|Not valuable| d1["Discard it"]

    consume{Consume} -->|Valuable| capture{Capture}
    consume{Consume} -->|Not valuable| d2["Discard it"]

    capture{Capture} -->|Plugin / Kindle / App| db_ts[(Thought Saver)]
    capture{Capture} -->|Links / Notes| db_no[(Notion)]

    subgraph Knowledge Base
        db_ts[(Thought Saver)]
        db_no[(Notion)]
    end

Figure 2. The full pipeline that feeds information to my curated knowledge base.

Outflow: Extracting value 🔗

The approach I have described in this article yields two continuously expanding, curated datasets of knowledge, flashcards and a wiki. I use these in a couple of ways.

For the flashcards, I have established a routine of doing a daily quiz of 15 cards. It only takes a couple of minutes out of my day and I find it does wonders for retaining learnings.

To leverage the wiki, I usually look for topics at work I want to tackle that overlap with what I have collected data about. As the wiki continuously grows with the information I have reviewed and find valuable, it offers a great starting point whenever I need to address an issue. Additionally, as I collect information and notes on a particular matter over time, it eventually turns into a blog post, like this one on mutation testing.

That is it, folks. My system of learning. A path to insights, growth and joy.

Personal Growth