Ask HN: How do you organize studying for a course?

I need feedback on how people organize the whole process of studying for particular knowledge/skills domain, be it a university course or a new technology needed for his work/startup/etc.

More specifically, the questions without ordering:

* How do you organize the study materials and documents - textbooks/ebooks, papers, lecture notes, video lectues, assignments/exercises (+ answers) - generally the knowledge sources? The missing part for me is a way for centralized access for all these documents. The best that I've come up is a personal wiki with a page for the course and links to all the relevant documents. In theory, it should work, but it becomes a mess fairly quickly after the number of documents exceed, for instance, 10-15.

* How do you manage the tasks / "atomic" things that needs to get done next (the "Next Action" in the Getting-Things-Done lingo)? Do you use software application to handle these for you, and if you do, which one? The challenge here is mainly the multiple books/documents that need to be tracked for the reading progress, exercises done progress, etc.

The applications that I've tried using the above requirements with mixed success were: Wikidpad (personal desktop wiki), Thinking Rock (desktop GTD application), MonkeyGTD (personal browser-based wiki with GTD features), ToDoList2 (desktop todo application).

To recap, I still searching for a "solution" that allows me to follow this sort of workflow on my studies. Use case scenario:

1. On the day scheduled for study, I open the application and I see the very next concrete things that needs to get done. For instance: read Section 2.3 from Book #1; read Section 3.5 from Book #3; do exercises 1, 5, 11 from Book #4 (page 345); watch video lecture #4 and take notes....

2. As I'm crossing off the things that gets done I'm adding the next actions to be done that need to show off on the "project home page" when I return for the next study session.

3. The "tasks"/"actions" provide easy access for the study resources that are involved in completing the task - for instance, hyperlinks to the documents, files, etc.

Thanks you for your patience

Generally, I'll make sure to map out complex tasks by breaking them into simple components/milestones, each with a clear deadline.

More specifically, I've been using Google Calendar for about a year to great effect to keep track of my freelancing, the non-profit I run, and also the side jobs I take (substitute teaching and tutoring). In addition, I use it to keep track of my personal life, including social engagements/obligations and birthdays.

The "Tasks" feature and I never really got along, so instead I created different calendars for each domain. Relevant days and times are extremely easy to keep track of (as you might expect).

I'll generally store hyperlinks in the "Description" box. I'll also sometimes mark calendar events with an asterisk if there is something in the "Description" box that I need to look at (be it a hyperlink, a "Bring _____" note, or some other actionable item). If there are relevant files, I'll either keep them out on my desktop, or I'll include a hyperlink to the file in Google Docs (under the "Share" dropdown menu).

Each morning, my calendar will e-mail me an agenda for the day. Items that I don't complete get moved ahead to the next day (or to a later time that day). If I finish things ahead of schedule, I'll move them back to when I finished them and congratulate myself with a delicious and healthy fruit smoothie.

You might find that GCal is suboptimal for your purposes (I don't know how well this meshes with the GTD system, as this has worked so well for me that I've never needed to explore alternatives), and it may be a bit less automated/centralized than what you're looking for. Or perhaps you're leery of feeding information to the Googleplex. But I've found my system to be useful and unobtrusive, so perhaps others might as well.

I started using OneNote my last year of school and thought it was perfect for the task. I'm not sure it's strictly superior to a personal wiki, though it's arguably easier to set up and arguably has a better UI. If you don't have Office, the web-based OneNote at http://office.live.com might work for you, though I haven't used it much (and I suspect it won't support entering of equations).

Emacs org-mode: http://orgmode.org/