Ask HN: How do you personally learn?

Aside from learning by doing, I spend a fair amount of time building intuition. Reading a lot is the bulk of my strategy. Blogs, books, HN comments, reddit and the occasional YT video. This is all passive, so it's not as good as actually doing stuff, but I find that it accumulates (slowly) and helps me build more context, which ultimately leads to something of an intuition for whatever I'm working on. I've been doing this for about twenty years.

I've recently been experimenting with note taking and spaced repetition. Basically when reading, I try to add the occasional tidbit to an Anki deck. I don't think I've gotten the hang of this yet, I currently feel like I'm not adding enough entries, but I want to avoid creating too many notes. Suggestions about stricking a balance would be greatly appreciated.

Edit: typo

I use Anki to learn the basic language and terms. When I joined a new company and domain last year for example, it was a lot of new acronyms.

When searching through documentation, I look for the dense writing of scientific papers. Clear definitions are very useful but often missing in documentation.

Look for the "greybeards" and listen to them. Their intuition is valuable. However, if you have a solid argument then have no fear to voice your concerns. If you disagree with someone more experienced then take the time to really find out why.

If I decide to learn an entirely new skill 'X', my steps are generally:

1. Imagine how I would do 'X'

2. If I hit any walls, I look up that specific step

3. Eventually I end up with a complete idea of how to do X, so that I have a basic mental model of X to challenge and grow

4. I then look up videos/articles/books on how to do X - important to do this before testing step 3 as "1 month in the workshop saves 1 hour in the library"

5. Once I've seen a few different ways of X, then I try to do it. If it doesn't work I go back to step 4 and learn more.

6. (OPTIONAL - if I want better results) I first iterate on the 'final product', to see how tweaking various steps affect the final result. For example, if I'm brewing beer I'll do two attempts in parallel with one varied parameter, so I can figure out how that single parameter is affecting the result.

7. (OPTIONAL - if I feel creative) Once I have a good idea on how to do X with success and sufficient quality, I then consider if I can innovate.

8. (OPTIONAL - if I want to be a master) Once I'm done innovating on X, and feel satisfied that "this is good enough", I try to make the process more efficient.

9. Share results with interested friends, and use their feedback to go back to step 6.

Does anyone have a system they would recommend for organizing physical notes that backs them up in the cloud?

I take a lot of notes the old fashioned way because I find it helps my retention, but they can pile up fast when I'm particularly busy.

I use syncthing across various devices and organize a group of folders with markdown files in them, then view / edit them with a markdown editor.

Super simple, free, and the best note system I've used so far.