Ask HN: Do you have a process or a framework to learn specific skills quickly?

Yes for computer-based skills, I’ve got an effective method. I write executable docs as I go, where I can select sub entries of comments and instructions and execute them. That’s the meat of the technique but the devil was in the details of making the system quickly navigable, well formatted, terse, executable on all the platforms I use, suitable for all applications I work on. And just as important, it was in the details of the learning strategies and tactics.

This is good advice. But for me, the hours’ struggle is more useful if not contiguous.

I get the best results from struggling with a given problem for no more than 1 hour continuously, and then going away and coming back sometime after my next sleep.

By struggling I mean “not making visible progress” - if progress is happening then just keep rolling.

Here is a meta-rule: Avoid learning skills if you can get away with it. This allows you to focus your time and attention on skills you cannot function without.

Maybe someone else has this skill and they can help you. Maybe there is software that does the skill for you. Etc.

The skill acquisition process is arduous and high opportunity cost.

It’s only worth going through the skill acquisition process if you are doing it for pure joy, OR you have no other way to get the benefit of that skill.

Some years ago I learned to touch-type in a month, at twenty minutes a day—though of course actually getting used to it took some months more. Ever since, I'm struggling to recreate the same approach in different topics.

I used the app TIPP10, a completely no-nonsense program that just presents you with progressive exercises, rates your performance, and crucially, shows how far you're from the end goal. So I just clacked at the keyboard and watched the progress meter steadily go forward. Had to change my approach once when I was trying to go fast and kept making errors, stalling in the actual learning—after I slowed down everything went smoothly again.

Now, I'd so much like to have a progress meter for when I'll be able to extract meaningful sounds from the piano or the guitar, or reason about electrics, etc. For the mechanical music skills, I'm putting some hope into Synthesia and Rocksmith. For knowledge, I guess actual courses and exercises are self-measuring: either I can remember and apply what I already learned, or I can't. However the measuring gets harder with topics that don't fit into one course or which require banging at them full-time for ages (like chess).

(I've already tried to learn touch-typing about ten years before that, and the combination of my youthful impatience with the woefully misguided approach of the exercise app I then used, turned the experience into a wreck. The app presented me with the ‘persona’ of the author as the sage teacher: his virtual remarks cooed and comforted me after the mistakes, encouraged me patronizingly, and offered bits of psychological well-being wisdom, all of which just made me hate myself, the app and the endeavor.)