https://azeria-labs.com/the-importance-of-deep-work-the-30-h...

So basically, instead of just going through different subjects try to work on 1 subject/topic for 30 hours (across multiple days, maybe take a break between days) and then check if you want to go further on the subject. Apparently, 30 hours is a good enough time frame to realise if you have an interest on the subject of your choosing.

I'm struggling to actually start with something interesting, and after reading your comment I remembered the process outlined in the article. Thanks!!

1) Spend an hour in planning (what to learn, based upon what you've learned so far). 2) Spend an hour learning about a single random topic. 3) Spend 6 hours digging deeply into a long-term topic.

I have so many interests, it's sometimes crippling.

How I somehow, barely manage the situation now:

- Do what I have a deadline for.

- Start or join a study group with enough members that at least 5% of them are seriously motivated. Or ONE serious study partner.

- Learn in the public. Pick a subject, force yourself to write and share summaries, notes, etc. publicly. And promise the next "issue" on a set date.

- Rather than finding a subject, find a person who matches one of your interests and learn that with them. Having a person keeps you motivated. And not continuing makes you lose face. I always wanted to learn German and Spanish. I am finally putting effort for German because I have recently reconnected with a friend who learned German in college. I started learning Guitar recently even though I am more interested in Piano because I have a friend who came back to town who is an okay guitarist, and can teach me regularly, rather than having to rely on Skillshare courses.

- Timeblock specific days and times of the week. Hell or high water, do that.

- Having specific goals help. "Have enough knowledge about this so I can write a Quora article in it", "Know enough about Fast Fourier Transform to be able to code it in Python and explain to a college Freshman", "know enough of X to be able to do Y". This removes the initial inertia.

- Another very helpful thing is- just starting. If you just start doing something you have waited for long to start you are building more inertia, and adding newer items. My advice to you and myself is to just start. When you start, you actually stop liking ~70-80% of the topics. That way you remove clutter. When you haven’t started something, you have a rosy picture of that. Once started, you know the reality.

These are the ways I try to deal with this. Would love to know better ways.

These are unsolved problems, that's why the material keeps getting produced. I think if you can find inspiration or a good "nutritional meal" to last for a while, it's a good thing. If nothing else, it serves to motivate. That's a big plus.

I'm pretty dense and hard-headed, so I have the hand-grenade theory of teaching myself: I just keep lobbing book-after-book into my own ignorance over time until I make progress. The vast majority of my attacks on my own personal ignorance are ineffective in the long run, but you know what? Little pieces here and there tend to stick. Maybe nobody's said it before or maybe it just takes the right author in the right context to get to me. I suspect the latter. After enough pieces stick, I can start actually working the problem of making myself better.

People who want to help in areas like this (unsolved domains) will BS one another in a heartbeat. I suspect that it's all so contextual to each of us we're just not aware of what we're doing. I don't know. But it means that personal recommendations of material should make you wary, especially if they come with heavily-laden emotional terms. ("Fight the evil corporate management structure!" or something like that) Like an organist that rests on the pedals too much, you get a long ways with books like this by making them emotional. Once again, motivation is great. If that's all you get, that's still a win for many.

So now we get to the heart of it. The real problem is coming up with evaluation criteria. Everything is great until there's a feedback loop and a way to fail, so your long-term job in trying to learn is setting up faster feedback loops and clear criteria to indicate success or failure. From there you can begin sorting out the "good" parts of the material from the fluff.

But that's just me. Until I had a good, solid way of evaluating whether something failed, a criteria that could point me to consuming smarter the next time, I was just going meal-to-meal.

1. How do you learn: My learning strategy might seem a little weird but I'll explain it anyway. For me the first part about learning is about familiarity. If your brain sees to many words it does not know it subconsciously shuts down and you get frustrated/demotivated (at least for me). So you have to iterate over a topic in order to feel familiar with it's vocabulary. Just think of those Wikipedia rampages where you go deeper and deeper down certain words until you don't know where you originated from: that's because you are not familiar with the vocabulary of the field. So my first step is to learn the vocabulary of the topic by 1: reading a short book about the basics (or the first 100 pages or something) and 2: I find a place (online) where people working in this field hang out (e.g Reddit, HN etc.) and just read what kind of problems they have, which kind of words and tools they are using which kind of projects they work on. I do this daily, multiple times, and follow on things that really spark my interest and try to understand as much as possible. My brain works very interest based. I try to answer simple questions in forums, and try to get involved but only in simple stuff (since obviously I am just learning). At this point I try to apply the very basic things i've learned and iterate myself further by asking basic questions about stuff I don't understand etc. After having reached a certain familiarity with vocabulary and basics I try to explain why does tool X exist, what problem does it solve, what pros and cons exist. I think about how I would explain the necessity of X to someone who is not in the field. After that in the second phase I learn mostly like everybody else from books, online resources and just doing what I learn. But now I can read books a lot faster and with much fewer frustration because my brain is familiar with it, knows why X exists and which cool projects X is applied to. Thinking about it, my strategy is mostly tricking my brain into not being bored or overwhelmed.

2. How do you decide what to learn: I learn because my job requires me to be familiar with Y. That's one part, can't really change much about that. The second part, for me personally is purely interest based. I always try to learn concepts/methods instead of tools. Don't care if it is useful or you will ever really apply it, BUT: if I learned a useful concept instead of a tool, I will always be ready to apply it somewhere else. We humans are masters in generalizing things and applying concepts we have seen somewhere else.

Since you asked about HYPE-TECH-A vs something that truly interests you: I always in my life picked my interests not the hype, and it always worked out. If you are motivated to learn something you can gain knowledge several times faster compared to force feeding yourself something that you might apply maybe somewhere in the future.

4. How do you handle the pressure of that huge mountain of stuff you don't know:

Just have a good mental health. Be aware that staring to long into the abyss of stuff you don't know will never lead to anything good. You have to be aware of the things that you don't know, but let it give you a joyful humbleness instead of fear. Just think about it this way: you will never run out of interesting things to learn. The joy of learning will always be available. Your mind is not a commodity of your future employer, instead learning new things should be your privilege and bring you joy.

Eventually I just forced myself to choose one thing and focus on it. When I get to the point where I feel competent in it, whether that's a day or 3 months, then I allow myself to move onto something else.

Don't get stuck in your head. Just choose something and commit, no one knows everything, the posts are by hundreds of people, each with skills in different areas. Know one knows it all.

1. Work out what material you need to cover on your required studies.

2. Break it down into shorter, manageable bits. A chapter per week, perhaps.

3. Make completion of these bits concrete, so you know you are progressing (and not just reading). Completing the exercises, perhaps.

4. Break down the bits even further, so you can plan them across days.

5. Every day at the same time, start working on these bits.

6. When you finish your bits for a day, stop working. Your reward is the rest of the day to learn about whatever you feel like, guilt-free.

Here are some things I try to keep in mind as I try to learn new things:

* Get enough sleep and nutrition. If you're tired/hungry you're going to feel overwhelmed faster

* Don't rely on motivation, instead rely on discipline. Motivation is great for a burst of energy, but it will eventually leave you. Discipline, on the other hand, is what will make you start and finish that book / online course, etc.

* Track your progress in whatever way is best suited to you. This could be as simple as a check on a calendar or using an app. Personally I like the Jiffy and Habits app on the Android store. Seeing progress helps with both motivation and discipline.

* Learn one thing at a time. It's tempting to spread yourself thin, but sticking to one thing is best.

* Give yourself more time than you think you'll need to learn. In a classroom setting you can raise your hand and ask an expert a question which they can quickly clear up for you. When you're doing self-study you'll find that you may ask the wrong question, interpret things wrong, go down a Google rabbit hole trying to understand related topics, dig through forum answers which may not quite answer your question, and leave you with even more questions.

* Figure out your learning method. Maybe it's video, maybe it's a book. Your preferred learning method may change over time and it may change by topic. Don't be afraid to stop one method and pick up with a new one, or change midway through. For example, when I'm learning a new language I find video courses helpful to get me started, but then once I'm running and past the basics, I find text content easier to digest.

* Personally I get frustrated when learning new things when someone decides to coin a new jargon term. For example a little while back I ran into the term "upsert" to refer to an "update or insert" process. The text I was reading used it like I was supposed to know what it was, but I had never run into it before. These things frustrate me and usually make me feel like I'm way behind in basic knowledge and tend to kill both motivation and discipline. Why not just the extended-term, especially in a course designed for beginners? It causes a weird mental block for me. My solution is to just say "Fuck you, but fine. I accept this as it is". It's a little mental prayer than helps me move past the feeling.

2) n/a

3) yes, sort of. Learning something an hour per day over 10 days > learning something for 10 straight hours in one day

4) no method, but I tend to naturally go just below the surface on many different topics, so I think that helps.

A key thing for me is that I learn best by doing.

So maybe watching 5-10 hours of a structured "course", usually at 1.5x speed is about my limit before I have to get started on my own project applying what I'm learning.

After that, it's mostly blog posts, GitHub, and Stack Overflow to learn the more advanced aspects.

First I have set up an intense learning regime for myself, my first 'semester' is on the basics in a lot of different subjects. (math, physics, nutrition, fitness, programming theory, gardening, writing, photography, chemistry, taoism, buddhism, carpentry and a few others)

Second I have worked up a basic triage system for dealing with all of the information that I have flowing to me: 1st off is it of interest or not, is yes then why? For entertainment or for knowledge? If it is for entertainment then I will read it if I have accomplished my learning goals for the day, if not, oh well, into the trash. If its for knowledge then does it apply to one of my learning topics? If not, then bookmarked for a rainy day or another semester.

For the stuff that applies to one of my current learning topics I apply the methodology from "How to read a book" (recommended to me by someone here, and I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to read to go from "understanding less to understanding more") and scan it to see if and where it has a place in my learning network/schedule, then put it into my learning tracking database for integration into this or a later semester depending on how it fits.

Its been an interesting couple of months, and I will start blogging about how this process is coming along. After a bit of a wobbly start, and a hard time finding good resources on how to make self-guided learning more efficient I am starting to see good progress in my learning, feel more comfortable with my online consumption and am really starting to make some progress on my start-up ideas and just my life in general.

Right now, I usually pick one thing I want to learn and then focus on it for a few days to a few weeks at a time.

The problem is finding time. Usually anytime I think I'm bored, I immediately get up and start reading/doing tutorials/etc on whatever I want to learn.

It takes some discipline, but once you start, it's pretty easy to make a habit of it.

Doing it every day on the other hand, I would quickly need the thing I just learned, both reinforcing the learning and making it easier to apply it. Then as progress was much faster, it was more motivating as I could see myself making gradual progress each day, such that completing each course seemed like a doable undertaking.

If I really want to master the topic, I will try to only study a few hours a week and do the exercises, but I rarely get the discipline required.

For me, I deliberately split across multiple topics/books because my brain has different thresholds of concentration depending on time of day. The early mornings are best for more challenging subjects (e.g. math, deep learning algorithms, etc). At night, it's easier to read softer topics like history and politics. I think it's important to pay attention to your brain's energy levels and when/how it gets distracted. With that knowledge, you optimize your learning schedule around that.

>- Do you use any tools to track your resources, todos, notes, or goals?

Since learning time is finite, I think it's a important to put together a little curriculum of all the topics you want to learn. Prioritize them.

>Are there any pain points you have while learning

Another piece of advice that nobody ever seems to emphasize (but I wish I had known early in life) is that there are topics that will be a waste of time to learn. In my case, I regret I spent hours on PowerBuilder, IBM DB2, and DOS batch scripting with VBScript. It doesn't mean those skills are bad for others but a little research would have made me realize there were other more important skills to spend precious hours on. (Time spent learning X is time not spent on learning Y.) The tldr is that people will often evangelize things for you to learn that you really don't need to learn. They have good intentions with their advice but they don't know the complete picture of your life's goals.

I found my self dive in to the subject much faster when there was no need to think about where to start.