Ask HN: How do you manage self-study?

Take notes online or offline or both. Just write down what you learned in prose and store it in plain text files. Don't worry about organizing it, you can always add a full-text search later (if you wanted everything to be interlinked, google "Sublime Zettelkasten").

Knowledge sticks best if you get practical and use it, too, e.g. by writing some code. But the day has only 24 hours, so you won't be able to try out everything in practice. It's OKAY.

There's no need to finish one thing before starting the next one, but you ought to keep moving forward at least a little bit with each book that you are pursuing, or you'll end up having 25 books with only one chapter read. This is NOT okay, but don't worry - if you notice it, just prevent yourself from letting yourself start a new book as long as k are still unfinished. Don't worry about buying more books than you can read. Always good to have a personal library of good books in case there's a lockdown e.g. due to a pandemic, and it's OKAY to postpone reading them until you have finished the one you are working on right now.

It's a great idea to have a project, and to learn all those things that your project needs (= that you need to complete your project to your satisfaction). This is useful because it delineates what to read/try/master/experiment and where to stop. If you work as a developer or scientist, you normally have one or more projects given to you or self-selected, and focusing on these keeps you grounded and avoids you getting lost. Having a project means you do not just CONSUME knowledge but that you will also PRODUCE something, which gives you fulfilment.

YouTube is a useful supplement and it may speed up your learning, but note that there is a lot of overlap both in books and online. Focusing on one book per topic gives you a sense of where you are (x% complete), which may be helpful for orientation and self-motivation, too. It's OKAY to supplement with additional reading and videos, but I'd suggest stick to one text book as your master source to have that orientation.

Having access to a group of students, e.g. at a university (research group, reading group) or meet-up, is also very helpful to stay motivated. Nothing stops you from forming your own if there isn't one for the topics you care about. Nowadays it could be virtual, too. People in groups can learn based on personal study and then congregate to discuss or they can teach each other different sub-parts of the materials that the group attempts to master.

Best of luck!

"When action becomes unprofitable, gather information. When gathering information becomes unprofitable, sleep."

1) Echoing what someone has already said, a big key is to do a little each day. Before doing that, I would try to read whole chapters of books at a time and feel overwhelmed. Setting aside 30 minutes each day and sticking to it, even if you feel you have more energy at the end, is the way to go. Progress will be slow, and it'll take you months to read a book. But you'll learn a lot this way, and the sporadic bursts accomplish much less in my experience.

2) When choosing what to read, I tend to go for books that are fundamental. I do ML/stats work, so that tends to be math books on probability, linear algebra, stuff like that. These also tend to be the books that require the greatest mental effort.

3) Watching stuff on YouTube isn't a bad thing! The books I got the most out of were those that also had an online lecture series.

Point 2 reminds me of Peter Thiel's power law: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Thiel_on_power_law.

It's probably best to literally ask yourself that question honestly, but a good rule of thumb might be: If it's not intellectually stimulating, it's probably pure entertainment. This is tricky because some good forms of entertainment will make you think, but probably not enough to be considered "learning" in the way we mean here.