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- Do you focus on one topic/book/course/project/article at a time, or split your time between multiple things?
- Do you use any tools to track your resources, todos, notes, or goals?
- Are there any pain points you have while learning, or are there any tools you wish existed?
I focus on the thing that I'm most interested in at the moment. That is rarely an entire book, though I've done that too.
If I feel like I need to take notes to keep track of what's going on, I will do so. I might also leave a note about things I've skipped or glossed over and should want to (re)visit again later.
The biggest pain point is usually scattered information, or information that assumes some background you don't have and doesn't give you enough clues to fill in.
2. Try it.
3. Reflect on what went wrong.
4. Go to 1.
As for learning I usually mind map concepts I thought were interesting and then review the mind maps and create flash cards. It depends on the content however.
If it is something actionable like learning a programming language, I try to use the knowledge straightaway and build things. :)
This approach has the advantage that it lets you decide what's important. I also like to believe that it establishes better connections between the single ideas.
I would say that goals are counterproductive until you are somewhat comfortable but not when starting out. Like yeah sure, you should make some progress but you are in an uncharted territory, the best thing you can do is to walk around a bit and make sure you stay engaged.
If you move to a new city, you probably walk around the neighborhood for a bit, then to the neighborhood next to yours etc etc.
There is a difference between knowing that, and knowing how.
When you want to learn that something is the case, read.*
When you want to learn how something is done, do.
If you want to learn how to do something, and you are not doing the thing, then you might find yourself not learning.
* You can take notes, summarize, and repeat.
The common thread in both is mastering the foundations. I know this is controversial, but I believe in book learning before playing whack-a-mole around the internet, simply because you aren't at the point where you can differentiate the signal from the noise.
After the foundations, I learn on a need-to-know basis, which is generally more applicative: if you are trying something that's never been done before, then the perspective is top-down instead of bottom-up.
I don't use notes, todos, online tracking, or whatever goal-oriented resources people are using. I don't see learning as a goal-oriented exercise so much as an accidental accumulation of knowledge. Knowledge gained best from a genuine interest in the subject at hand, which often leads into a genuine struggle to learn some topic, either because it is genuinely difficult or it something you find boring but necessary to learn to continue.
I'm an autodidact, and really, the best advice I can give is learn yourself first. Be absolutely honest with yourself about your interests, your limitations, and the answers, via a long journey of trial and error, will eventually come to you. The fact is, we aren't all able to fit into a mold, and no matter how much advice you read... advice reading is pretty much worthless without a grounding on failure.
For books, you have to generally read them like 5 times. The first pass might take me like an hour, it's mostly to establish a general mental framework for what's in the book (actually try to read the table of content, and like familiarize yourself with the words you might not know). On the second pass, you will actually try to read the book and retain like 20% of what you read. On the next one try the next 30%. This…
http://pne.people.si.umich.edu/PDF/howtoread.pdf
I find it valuable for another reason: I'm always constrained for time, so I might not get through an entire book. If that book is deeply technical, it discourages me from continuing, because I have to take the time to re-skim what was read previously.
I somewhat recently started trying the above method. With multiple iterations through the book, I can get an idea of the information and at the very least know where it find it and that it exists. Depending on the iteration, I'll have some notes to fall back on, or have some important concepts underlined.
What has worked for me is having multiple periods of immersion into a concept or topic, while referring to multiple sources, with notes [1] summarizing small bits as I learn them. I keep refactoring those notes as my understanding grows, to include coherent maps of larger and larger chunks. On short time scales, my learning is not measurable, but experience indicates that my understanding grows over time. Looking back, my periods of immersion range from a few hours/days, while I tend to revisit topics every few weeks/months. I guess this falls under the umbrella of spaced repetition methods.
Since my interests and pursuits are very diverse, and I'm seldom "finished" with something, I don't like the psychological weight of todo lists [2]. I maintain lists of interesting stuff [3], and several hundred browser tabs [4] but they're mostly not things to be checked off, and languish peacefully for long periods. That said, I'm on the lookout for better knowledge/idea management workflows and software. What I currently use is organically grown, and very messy.
That was for theoretical understanding. Practice helps, for things one "does".
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[0]: Venkatesh Rao: A Big Little Idea Called Legibility -- https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call...
[1]: Markdown files, or scribbles/diagrams on scratch paper
[2]: Scott Hanselman: It's not what you read, it's what you ignore -- https://www.hanselman.com/blog/ItsNotWhatYouReadItsWhatYouIg...
[3]: Zim Wiki notebook -- http://zim-wiki.org/manual/Help/Notebooks.html
[4]: I <3 Firefox and the TabGroups extension