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How do you track and decide what topics you want to spend time learning?

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Re: How do you track and decide what topics you want to spend time learning?

#31

Post by djhworld »

nyellin wrote: post #26

If anyone is struggling to stay on top of notetaking or organizing their life digitally, I highly recommend org-mode and deft-mode. One day I will blog about what org-mode has done for my life, but for now just accept my word: I have typed tens of thousands of words into each of EverNote, Tomboy, and TiddlyWiki. I attempted to use Remember the Milk, Google Tasks, and other todo apps for years. I also unsuccessfully s…

http://orgmode.org/ for those unfortunate Vim souls (like me) who had to google that!

Re: How do you track and decide what topics you want to spend time learning?

#32

Post by nyellin »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #29
nyellin wrote: post #26

If anyone is struggling to stay on top of notetaking or organizing their life digitally, I highly recommend org-mode and deft-mode. One day I will blog about what org-mode has done for my life, but for now just accept my word: I have typed tens of thousands of words into each of EverNote, Tomboy, and TiddlyWiki. I attempted to use Remember the Milk, Google Tasks, and other todo apps for years. I also unsuccessfully s…

Do you use deft-mode along with org-mode, or as an alternative? Could you share some thoughts and experiences? I'm a happy user of org-mode and I'd like to know more :).

Call me old fashioned, but I think notes of different topics shouldn't mingle with one another, and dumping all your notes in one file is a recipe for creeping disorder.

I use Deft for listing note files and performing full-text searches to find the right one. Deft is buggy and I would like something better, so most of the time I fallback to using Ido. I fuzzy-match filenames in the minibuffer and only open Deft when I have no choice.

I added functions to Deft for using multiple note directories: https://github.com/aantn/castle/blob/master/home/.emacs.d/cu...

Warning: The above functions might break Deft's ability to create new notes (it might already be broken). I create the files myself with C-x C-f (or f in Evil), because I like descriptive filenames.

Re: How do you track and decide what topics you want to spend time learning?

#33

Post by c4urself »

jonsagara wrote: post #17

I have been using Trello since it launched. It works great for managing my reading list.

I've been using Trello for just about everything, from organizing Groceries with my wife to recurring events to todo lists, it's simple and it's not paper.

Re: How do you track and decide what topics you want to spend time learning?

#34

Post by wahnfrieden »

einhverfr wrote: post #19
wahnfrieden wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your process for consuming a textbook in 3-4 days?

2-4 hrs per night, spreading several related textbooks out with other topics in between.

How do you consume a textbook in 6-12 hours?

Re: How do you track and decide what topics you want to spend time learning?

#35

Post by juanre »

nyellin wrote: post #26

If anyone is struggling to stay on top of notetaking or organizing their life digitally, I highly recommend org-mode and deft-mode. One day I will blog about what org-mode has done for my life, but for now just accept my word: I have typed tens of thousands of words into each of EverNote, Tomboy, and TiddlyWiki. I attempted to use Remember the Milk, Google Tasks, and other todo apps for years. I also unsuccessfully s…

It's also had a large positive impact in my life, also after a long search that included writing a couple of ill-conceived note-taking web-site-generation programs.

I now spend most of my time in org-mode, and use it for publishing my web sites and blogs (I wrote org-jekyll for that), staying on top of the tasks of a bunch of people in my team (for which I wrote org-secretary), and keeping up-to-date documentation of the progress of the projects we are working on at HP. And I like being able to export and distribute them in LaTeX -> PDF.

I haven't felt the need of deft-mode: C-c a s does the trick of finding what I need most of the time.

Re: How do you track and decide what topics you want to spend time learning?

#36

Post by nerfhammer »

djhworld wrote: post #31
nyellin wrote: post #26

If anyone is struggling to stay on top of notetaking or organizing their life digitally, I highly recommend org-mode and deft-mode. One day I will blog about what org-mode has done for my life, but for now just accept my word: I have typed tens of thousands of words into each of EverNote, Tomboy, and TiddlyWiki. I attempted to use Remember the Milk, Google Tasks, and other todo apps for years. I also unsuccessfully s…

http://orgmode.org/ for those unfortunate Vim souls (like me) who had to google that!

vim clone: https://github.com/hsitz/VimOrganizer

Re: How do you track and decide what topics you want to spend time learning?

#37

Post by einhverfr »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #34
einhverfr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2-4 hrs per night, spreading several related textbooks out with other topics in between.

How do you consume a textbook in 6-12 hours?

It is different for my hobby areas, where a lot of the textbooks are history, archaeology, and anthropology-related and relatively short (200-300 pages). The fact that there are occasional 500-600 page textbooks that take me a week or two are not a problem.

Hmmm on reviewing the books I have read, it seems my original list included some things that should not have been there. A quick assessment of ratios suggests I should drop it to 70-75 per year.

Re: How do you track and decide what topics you want to spend time learning?

#38

Post by HeyImAlex »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #34
einhverfr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2-4 hrs per night, spreading several related textbooks out with other topics in between.

How do you consume a textbook in 6-12 hours?

I can't speak for the person you're responding to but for me; ~400 pages of content, if it's dense I assume a pace of about 30 pages per hour, so about 14 hours of reading, maybe three hours of review total on top of that. If you're learning math concepts invest an hour or two of practice for every hour read.

If it's more light reading or less foundational I can do a bit less than page a minute. This week I trudged through EffectiveUI pretty mindlessly (a lot of O'Reilly books are very wordy and soft) in about six hours.

Re: How do you track and decide what topics you want to spend time learning?

#39

Post by itmag »

I have an elaborate system using text-files and tags/subtags, evolved over the last 5-6 years.

I keep track of a lot of things:

-expenses

-gym sessions

-leads for my magazine

-startup ideas

-personal development insights

-diary entries

-brainstorms

-quotes (see this: http://ideashower.posterous.com/idea-for-some-tiny-web-softw...)

-stuff I should read later (but almost never get around to)

-ideas for lyrics

-fragments for various novels I am working on

-various biometric data (morning weight, stuff like that)

-TODO

-plans (I do try to aggregate all of these into a standalone "plan file" since it's such a crucial function of my administrative system)

-and a bunch of other things I can't recall right now. Let's just say I generate a relatively huge amount of notes every single day.

So a typical temp file might contain some thing like this:

itm: IT9: recruit: foobar foobarsson

itm: todo: find logo designer

todo: buy anal lube

planfile: BHAGs: $big_hairy_audacious_goal

planfile: schemes: $insert_greasy_scheme

diary: 5/12 2011: went to Footown today, got wasted

expenses: 5/12 2011: cat food 10 kr | alcohol 300 kr | anal lube 49 kr

lyrics: $lyrics / $more_lyrics / $even_more_lyrics

idea: business: hamburger earmuffs

read: http://reddit.com/r/foo/whatever

insight: $deep_insight

brainstorm: what topics should I learn in 2012?

I dump all of this piecemeal into temporary text files which I then transfer periodically to a central place. I used to go through them and sort everything into separate piles, but at this point that would probably be a full time job.

If I need to find something these days, pretty much the only way is to use grep and hope that I tagged something the right way (sometimes I am too lazy and just dump crap in there untagged).

If you think it sounds like I run my life like a gigantic byzantine bureacracy, you would be right. But at the same time, it's probably a huge net-win for me in the long run as it allows me to keep track of stuff on a scale that would be impossible otherwise.

I would like to write some software that could parse my notes and make my life easier. Anyone else in the same boat?

Re: How do you track and decide what topics you want to spend time learning?

#40

Post by kaybe »

kevinalexbrown wrote: post #20

Much better than my lazy default which involves leaving relevant tabs open on my browser ... So I just did this exercise now, and at the risk of overtooling I'm going to keep a detailed list of the precise things I did to learn each thing. Because otherwise, I have that same tendency to convince myself I've spent 2 hours learning more about graphical models by browsing some blog posts, or about cooking by looking thr…

Two weeks later: Browser takes 10 Minutes to fire up. (One could leave the computer running, I guess, but argh, too many tabs..) How do you deal with this?
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