How do you track and decide what topics you want to spend time learning? • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by nyellin » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 2:53 PM UTC

marchdown wrote: post #56

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…

> Org mode can do absolutely everything. Ask and you shall learn. How do you capture different kinds of information — ideas, references to books or websites, events, addresses? What do you do more often — review agenda or search for specific keywords?

I mostly use Org for taking notes on classes and projects. I don't (yet) use Org for events.

Does this answer your question: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/282143/org.png

(That is a fullscreen Emacs with 3 Org buffers and a Deft search.)

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

#62

Post by beza1e1 » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 3:28 PM UTC

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…

I have a "Save For Later" Bookmarklet/Button in my browser. It makes the current side show up in my feed reader.

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

#63

Post by Sukotto » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 4:15 PM UTC

Really timely article. Thanks.

December is a good time to re-evaluate these sorts of things, and to book time for the ones requiring more effort (learning vim?) since many people have a lull at work at this time of year.

My own contribution to the OP is to encourage everyone to also create a "Pass" list of topics you had on your list but have chosen not to pursue (example in the OP was Shopify templates).

I find I need a list like that to stop my mind from revisiting those "I should learn" topics that I actually don't want to learn.

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

#64

Post by johndbritton » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 4:39 PM UTC

Back in September I went through a similar exercise and wrote down some details about it here:

http://johndbritton.com/2011/09/30/consciously-deciding-to-l...

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

#65

Post by pkrumins » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 5:03 PM UTC

I don't track anything. I just jump in topics I want to learn at any time.

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

#66

Post by Shtirlic » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 5:04 PM UTC

Also doing this kind of things, but with local wiki system(Golum based) and shared via DropBox.

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

#67

Post by gcr » Sat, Dec 10, 2011, 6:14 PM UTC

kaybe wrote: post #40

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?

Try Luakit. http://luakit.org/projects/luakit It's a creamy webkit center with crunchy vim keybindings on top, all bound together with lua.

The tab management isn't much better than Chrome's, but boy does it start up fast, and the memory usage is peanuts even compared to chrome. I bet you could script your own tab manager in lua if you wanted to. Maybe there's a plugin for it somewhere.

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

#68

Post by pbackx » Mon, Dec 12, 2011, 11:24 AM UTC

I use Evernote to track everything, including this.

I dump everything looks cool into a "maybe" notebook. Before I add anything I search to see if there's a related note. This lets me aggregate and if I sort on "last updated date" I tend to get a good idea of what's important to me.

From time to time I go over the list and see if stuff can and should be purged.