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Ask HN: The “I want to do everything but end up doing nothing” dilemma

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Re: Ask HN: The “I want to do everything but end up doing nothing” dilemma

#51

Post by jonahhooper »

Im in a similar position to you and also have this problem. Although it's relatively annoying, I find that I have ended up learning and gaining a reasonable understanding of some things (theory of programming languages, parsing and haskell, etc) by stopping for a few months (university takes up a lot of time) and coming back to them. Although when I require some body of knowledge as a requirement to complete a task, I find it far easier to focus and learn a single thing without getting distracted. So for me creating a distinction between what I need to know immediately in my daily life and what I'm learning for fun has been quite helpful in allowing me to focus. I call this the pre-emptive lazily evaluated learning strategy :P

Re: Ask HN: The “I want to do everything but end up doing nothing” dilemma

#52

Post by DanielBMarkham »

It occurs to me that you may be looking at this sideways.

We homeschooled our younger two kids. Specifically, we "unschooled" them. This meant that instead of a curriculum, they found things they enjoyed, created projects from them, then executed. As part of executing, they naturally learned stuff. Worked great.

On the other hand I went to a traditional school. That meant I thought of topics in little silos. Want to learn math? Well gee, that could be a full lifetime of study. Everything I look at appears to be infinitely deep.

Find projects that you can commit to that involve learning your topics to the depth you would like. Then, instead of the topics, execute on the projects. Doesn't matter if anybody likes your projects or even if you use them -- by getting your head out of the vertical silo and starting to think horizontally, you'll probably learn in a much more natural fashion.

My two cents.

Re: Ask HN: The “I want to do everything but end up doing nothing” dilemma

#54

Post by jotm »

Aleksandrov wrote: post #28

Hi, Michael) "information paralysis" Is that a problem? So, may be it is not? May be it's an opportunity) Let's solve it) Imagine very-very big mindMap (like that, but much bigger http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-QCtHZYRX_0w/UcbhaceT4MI/AAAAAAAAAW... ). Imagine, each word in there is a single knowledge. All this knowledges are ether unbounded from each other or bounded in small groups and all placed chaotically. This is how…

Needs some work, but you're basically proposing an Edx/Udemy/(etc)/Wikipedia/PersonalBrain mashup? Sounds interesting...

Re: Ask HN: The “I want to do everything but end up doing nothing” dilemma

#55

Post by junto »

eng_monkey wrote: post #31

> As a CS student / junior engineer A would suggest you learn the difference between CS and Engineering.

I'm not sure whether you intended your comment to be both pedantic and faecitious, but it unfortunately comes across as unconstructive.

Re: Ask HN: The “I want to do everything but end up doing nothing” dilemma

#57

Post by jackgavigan »

> I'm at the start of a 4-5 month stretch where I absolutely need to cover 4 highly technical subjects, on my own and unguided, to continue my studies.

Get yourself a mentor/supervisor who will (a) help you come up with a plan that prioritises those four subjects, (b) have regular interaction with you to track your progress, and (c) chew you out if you don't stick to the plan.

This seems to be a common issue for young, intelligent, technically-minded people. In my opinion, the solution is self-discipline and prioritisation (and, implicitly, having the judgement to know what should be prioritised).

Re: Ask HN: The “I want to do everything but end up doing nothing” dilemma

#59

Post by sputknick »

Let me put on my Project Management hat for a moment. I think you first need to enumerate, at the highest level what you want to achieve, should be one sentence or less. Maybe its "Become a world class python oriented Data Scientist". Under that you can break that down into four-ish domains you need to learn, in this case, Statistics, Python, Data Science, Data Visualization. From there break it down into subjects under those domains, each one being maybe 20-200 hours of work. Continue to break it down until you get to something you can accomplish in one sitting. One sitting is different for all people, for me it's about 50 minutes. Then when you sit down you don't have the cognitive overhead of trying to figure out what to do, it's already been done for you. From there, just knock out tasks one after another. Every few months re-examine to make sure you are on course. As far as tools, I use Trello to do this personnally, but there are others out there.
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