Ask HN: How do you manage self-study?

First of all accept that there is 100x time more useful knowledge to learn than you have time.

Next prioritize the things that will be the most relevant to your career or or side projects. Specifically focus on the concrete and relevant over the abstract and esoteric. The most useful topics are going to be applied an relevant to your goals. Think how do I use css over theory of design.

It's much easier for your brain to stay focused on items that are immediately relevant. Also focus on marketable projects over knowledge. I took an open source CMS and made the queries 2x as fast is a way better use of time than I red a bunch about Postgres tuning.

It took me years of this cycle before I turned a corner a few weeks ago - the phrase 'necessity is the mother of invention' became viscerally meaningful, and not just an empty platitude. In the past year or so I would instantly burn out as soon as I tried to push myself for longer than a day or two, because I was right at the edge of overwhelm before I even began.

I realised that it was on me to find the world where I had a forceful, motivating necessity behind me, and the right task in front of me... Otherwise I would simply not do anything at all. And that's a relieving truth, honestly. Be thankful that your brain budgets for you. It's probably a fundamental guard against extremely costly psychological conditions. You can't just induce mania every time you open one of those tutorial bookmarks.

Historically you'd have a child to look after by the age you had both energy and experience, and the ordeal would soak up both and (hopefully) give you a bit of wisdom in return... Millenials and younger are having to shortcut this step to wisdom in a world with incredible uncertainty. The infotainment hurricane inculcates us with FOMO. It's just not the kind of environment that rewards slow, deep, considered, enjoyable, reflective, /focused/ learning. And lets be real, we're in the middle a blooming pandemic.

Accept there are things which are not right for you, and that you might not ever get round to. Realise that your laziness and intuitive preferences keep the world of 'shoulds and oughts' a manageable size. They're also the levers to make it right again, if that world is growing out of control (I analogise them as natural defences against 'cognitive carcinogens').

Imho you don't need any more tools or methodologies, or resources/pdfs/tutorials - you need fewer. Same goes for entertainment. I resolved to stop my obsessive resource hoarding/kleptomania, and to stop spending my life force on stupid smoke and mirrors for my own motivational systems. Seriously, consider reducing your possibilities and spending some time without the Internet every day. It turns out that turning off the info pipes and going to town on deleting most of your local resources/bookmarks is highly relieving, once you're past the initial pain barrier.

All that said, Joplin is really good for notes and tasks - just whatever you do, don't get into Emacs+Org if you have trouble with procrastination (I recommend Doom Emacs + org-roam).

[0] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dalio

I dont think there is a way to know which one thing in the list of potential 1000 things, will be the one that has highest payoff. And the definition of payoff also depends on what your goals are. For examples, learning computer networking concepts will have different payoff for someone who wants to get a PhD in Machine Learning (it will help him/her write better software maybe, or add to his/her list of employable skills), vs someone who is building distributed systems. So you have to take some bets. Think about stuff like what one or two things you can learn in next 6 months that will get you closer to your most coveted goals. And just try to focus on them. If there are more than 1/2 things, filter them out based on what gets you excited more. At the end, its all about your perspective.

Here's a simple system: find out what resources you absolutely cannot bear to delete. If it's all of them, then your problem lies elsewhere.

You need an objective goal. In school you have a nice objective goal of acing a test or whatever. I've found learning stuff just because you want to know it is challenging, and you usually end up with a superficial understanding. Figure out what you want to do with it, then it becomes easier to motivate yourself and gauge your progress.