Most of my leanings fades away as time elapses, except for those which I get a chance to correlate/apply often at life. How do you manage your leanings ?
Ask HN: Do you maintain a log of what you learn? How often do you go over them?
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Re: Ask HN: Do you maintain a log of what you learn? How often do you go over them?
#2What do you mean by learnings? Actual skills or facts like TIL?
Re: Ask HN: Do you maintain a log of what you learn? How often do you go over them?
#3Keeping a daily journal with relevant work and discoveries is great. You can use a simple text editor and keep appending the current date to the top of the file and writing a few a lines. You can do one per-project, or a general one for your daily life and activities. I reel back through the tape every few months when I'm curious about the timeline of development/research/discovery.
Whittling it down, I think of it as Data, Insights, and Execution. First you need lots of data, then you get insights, and finally you can execute when you're close to maximizing on insights. Writing helps keep track of the first two, and if you want to teach then execution = communication, or how you package and present something.
Re: Ask HN: Do you maintain a log of what you learn? How often do you go over them?
#4Follow the same question in Ask HN asked a few hours before this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23138530
Re: Ask HN: Do you maintain a log of what you learn? How often do you go over them?
#5I keep a log of things like "here's the parameters for tar to extract a file" (yeah, I know, there's man pages, but not all systems have them). I review that item when I have to extract files from a tar archive. Until then, I don't care if I forget it - that's what the file is for.
Re: Ask HN: Do you maintain a log of what you learn? How often do you go over them?
#6I simply just write them down as a form of blogging content. I personally think if you are on a personal journey to learn, everything you learn coupled with your own perspective could potentially be the eureka moment for another. Keep a journal!
Here's my 'journal' to share my learning as a Software Engineer as well. Hope you enjoy it!
https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/post/2020-02-29-articles-in-sec...
Re: Ask HN: Do you maintain a log of what you learn? How often do you go over them?
#7Started documenting the things I learn in a section of my website called "snippets". It's purpose is to be a registry of copy-paste resources, like a personal stack overflow, and I'm trying to keep it as small and short as possible. Also I don't write things there right away. First they go in a "backlog" in my notes, and once I require the knowledge but forget the details I transition it into a post on the website. This forces me to still remember stuff and helps keep only the relevant pieces around. Still very new to this approach, only time will tell if it's indeed worth the effort.
Re: Ask HN: Do you maintain a log of what you learn? How often do you go over them?
#8I find it terribly distracting to have all the things that I have tried to learn in my "active" memory. So I cycle between phases where I am engaged with a subject for a while, and then move on to the next item in my (circular) list until I cycle back to the original subject again.
This is a serious impediment to developing any useful expertise in any area, but I have sort of made peace with this tendency. But not all is lost. It has been my experience that the next time I visit a previously learned topic, it's significantly easy for me to load everything to my "active" memory, and build-up from there. Apparently, you never truly forget the things that have once learned well. See here, for e.g.: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081117110834.h...
> Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology have been able to show that new cell contacts established during a learning process stay put, even when they are no longer required. The reactivation of this temporarily inactivated "stock of contacts" enables a faster learning of things forgotten.
I am no expert on memory, but from what I have read on the topic, our long-term memory is virtually unlimited, the main constraint being inability to recall rather than the memory content being erased. If you have once learned a topic well but haven't visited in a long time, you may not be able to recall it very easily, but you will be able to recognize or relearn it better than someone who doesn't have any exposure to the topic.
Re: Ask HN: Do you maintain a log of what you learn? How often do you go over them?
#9I put new facts into Anki ( https://apps.ankiweb.net/ ) and then they get reviewed daily, with a steady, slow addition of new facts.
It's a very effective way to keep everything in long-term memory. (It's also very difficult. You're trying to recall items that are just at the edge of your memory.)
Re: Ask HN: Do you maintain a log of what you learn? How often do you go over them?
#10(copy-pasted with modifications from my comment on a similar thread posted earlier)
I used to have an elaborate system, but I converged on a simple solution: I stash everything in a single Google Docs document.
I made the conscious decision to optimize for ease of use, so that the friction/effort to write something down is minimized.
At the same time, I also made a decision to not to adopt any organization system -- anything that increases the friction of use is eschewed. Search was all I needed. I've been using this system for the past 5 years or so, and it's been very productive.
To extract ideas from it, I routinely re-read stuff (it's in log format, so it's very easy to read) and use the Fieldstone approach (Weinberg)[1] to coalesce similar and interesting thoughts and rewrite into larger thoughts. I've gotten a lot of actionable ideas this way (that I actually go on to execute on).
So it's a system optimized for postprocessing rather than pre-processing. (The Fieldstone approach is a method from writing, rather than knowledge management.) I find that pre-processing systems are unsustainable over the long term unless you're exceptionally disciplined (also, it's hard to know how to structure knowledge until you've processed it -- most interesting ideas are a garbled mess when first encountered). I try to build systems that don't rely on sustained human discipline or the necessity of shoehorning into known organization units.
[1] https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2016/05/04/weinberg-on-writing...