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 struggled to recall information by bookmarking and tagging three thousand websites in delicious. Nothing worked and I was on the verge of giving up for sanity's sake and just emailing myself reminders and notes.
Then I discovered org-mode and took control. I can recall and store any information in seconds. Org mode can do absolutely everything. Ask and you shall learn.
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.
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.
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 <leader>f in Evil), because I like descriptive filenames.
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.
Depends on the volume of notes. Trying to do any kind of manual sorting on my notes is a full time job at this point.
I'm trying to leave the place I'm working, and I'm mostly concentrating on places that are a little above my weight class (because if I'm going to try and get a new job, I don't want to go work at the half-dozen places that do the exact same level of work that I do. I've had a few jobs not pan out, so I wanted to take a step back and rethink things)
So I started an Omni-Focus project, which I called Me 2.0 (although I could have used any of the myriad project-tracking applications, or just a text editor)
In it I started trying to list all the things I wanted to learn. I noticed when I finished that it was predominantly a list of books to read (many of which have exercises that I want to make sure I go through and actually complete).
I noticed that some of them have dependencies on other ones (so I linked those tasks) but others I can start working on in parallel. We'll see how well I can stick to it.
Just writing it all out was a helpful exercise though. There's something freeing about having specific tasks, and not just nebulous concepts.
>Instead of trying to do Deliberate Practice, I’d fool myself into thinking I was investing my time wisely by reading blog posts and examples but not actually doing much of anything.
That is one reason for serious learning I use textbooks. The book itself helps structure your learning, it is easy to keep track of how much you have covered, and commitment is simpler, since you can just commit to finishing the book.
It doesn't help as much though for longer term learning; I have a tendency to procrastinate between books, and often switch directions and even fields of study. On the other hand, the OP's "learning list" doesn't help much with that either.
Good point on textbooks. I would add to that a couple other things:
1) There are a lot of development-related things that I simply want cursory knowledge about right now. Blog posts, textbooks, and the like are great there. The way I go about things is to maintain a list of books to buy and buy them on a FIFO basis. Typically there is about a year lag between when a book goes onto the list and when it comes off and is purchased.
I then work through the book read it, etc. Go on to the next. The book then goes up on my reference shelf and I can go back to it when I need to.
The second group of things I need to learn I have strong knowledge in a related area and really need to work with someone to solve a particular problem. Niche areas of accounting (I maintain accounting software) is a good example of this. I bring myself up to a "conversational" level of knowledge, then work with a customer's accountant to make sure everything is implemented right.
But keep in mind I read about 100 textbooks a year and only a small minority are on IT. Most are hobbies (archaeology, linguistics, history, anthropology, and the like are big topics). It is easy to work an approach like this in.
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.
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.
That's a good point about textbooks. Do you find that if a book includes Exercises at the end of each chapter that you actually do them? That's been a big challenge for me - so many great books have 'Action' sections but I rarely find myself putting down the book and doing them.
This is a problem I frequently have. A while ago I decided to try to read through the whole book, and then go through and do the exercises. When I actually did it it worked _really_ well, but I found myself not being honest with myself and skimping on the review.
That depends on whether I am reading for information or actually trying to learn technique. If you are trying to learn to actually do something, you need to get practice somehow. My list of things I want to learn eventually is divided into two parts - things I want to learn about and things I want to learn to do.
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 through some cooking blogs but not actually taking the 2 hours to flail at bread-making. I'm not talking about every day recounting what I did, I think that's overly verbose, but just as a list under each of my goals that details each specific accomplishment.
Nice to see I'm not the only one who likes circus moves. One of my goals is handstand pushups. Needless to say, most of getting there is just exercise/weights/gym.
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.
There ought to be a way to run your tabs in the cloud... I'd pay for such a service!
The only downside is that I would need to invent some kind of SQL variant to find stuff among the tabs, as they would no doubt soon number in the thousands.
Best way to learn Vim is to get stuck without internet for 30 minutes. Once you explore every avenue of entertainment in your documents/downloads folders, you remember `$ vimtutor` and just have a go at it. Tried and true.
I want to be good at Vim, but it isn't practical for me at the moment. At work, I've spent the last year and half in Visual Studio or Eclipse (both due to the nature of the projects) and it was really hard for me to switch my brain into "Vim mode" for my own personal stuff.
With something as fundamental to the job as a text editor, I have to do it 8 hours a day or it won't stick.
I actually learned most of my Vim foundations using ViEmu[1] for Visual Studio. While some things are missing, it does an impressive job of emulating Vim and not stepping all over VS and R# (aside from Ctrl-R key bindings).
I used the viemu cheat sheet lessons[2] for the learning process. As I became comfortable with the commands in each, I moved on to the next lesson.
On the Eclipse side, I've been using viPlugin[1]. It is not free, but I've felt like it has been worth the cost since my forays into vim had all failed before getting this plugin. If you're working heavily with Eclipse/VS, it is definitely jarring to switch back and forth between one of those and vim, but using a plugin like this eases that pain.
It took me 5 days to stabilize my workflow in vim, and well worth it. Of course, those were 5 days without too much stress or deadlines, a few weeks ago. I still have a cheat-sheet print out, but am finding myself needing it less and less every day.
Although I've been working on fairly small web projects. For larger, corporate-style software development, the transition might be more difficult.
This is a great idea. As a step two, I would group them into categories (JavaScript, self-improvement, etc.) and then figure out time needed to become proficient in each one. Vim, for example, takes about 5 days to really get the hang of it, to pick up the essentials. The other tricks come later. CoffeeScript can become familiar after a weekend or two. A few of the others, like Arduino, take a little longer.
This is what I do when I want to learn things. Of course, I have a problem limiting it to programming. My list often includes stuff like "Thai cuisine" and "German" and "Celtic mythology".
The hardest part, in my opinion, is not tracking NEW things to learn, but tracking things to improve on.
I don't really focus on "topics", I pick something I really want to build then try and work out what the best suited tools and technologies are for that objective, then take it from there.
For my web startup idea this was Grails, because I work with Java in my day job and like the Rails convention over configuration philosophy. This leads to other areas like modern JavaScript frameworks.
For my video game idea it's Unity, for mostly productivity related reasons. This leads to JavaScript again (doesn't everything these days), C# and programmable shaders.
I don't want to spend my valuable time learning the latest new thing just for the sake of it. (I see loads of 'weekend projects' on here using Node/Backbone/Redis that seem to be this kind of thing). I want an immediate real-world application. I want something that will help me solve problems and smash my personal deadlines down like a pile driver. :)
I have a lot of non-IT stuff that I'd like to know at one time - so, in a spirit of sharing our TOKNOW lists, my current one:
- Economics
- Micro
- Macro
- "Applied" - stock markets, credits, all that stuff - how it works, etc. (I know almost nothing about it)
- Knowledge about societies - how they form, how they function, etc.
- Bayesian probability (working on it right now, thanks to AI Class), set theory, maybe category theory
- Control theory (I do really, really regret I didn't care about this at university)
- Biology
- Genetics 101 & blood groups (I forgot all this stuff since high school)
- Nutrition 101
- First aid
- Pretty much whole physics (Feynman's lectures sitting on my bookshelf and waiting ;))
- History
- of civilization, especially Roman history
- of science, technology and enterpreneurship
- of modern geopolitical structures
- Geography
- World energy infrastructure
- How many resources do we have, where they are, how fast we use them
- How the world trade works
- Literature
- "Homeless People"
- "Crime and Punishment"
- ... and then some other good books
And that's really just (non-IT) knowledge; there are also some skills I'd like to acquire that are not listed. I know some (most?) of that stuff was covered in high school, however I somehow missed it all then (I didn't care / school wasn't really helpful to make me care). This list reflects some topics I spend time thinking about / worrying about, but at some point I realized I should either sit down and learn some of it, or stop caring that much about things I don't understand.
From the technical side (which is actually the main topic ;)), I keep all of this in plain text; it used to be .txt files somewhere on my hard drive, now it's in Org Mode.
It's funny and sad when you realize that you care more about knowledge, learning etc. when you're out of school. Or maybe I was just not mature enough to appreciate it.
I think it's not about maturity, it's about having reasons to know. School can kill ones's interest in pretty much everything, as soon as your curiosity gets replaced by tests, grades, homeworks, rote, memorizing etc. But it's a long topic, covered on HN many times.
For me, most of the school subjects were utterly meaningless. I didn't understand then why could I care about how we produce electricity, where are the resources located. I didn't see any use for learning about kings and battles of the centuries behind (the only date I really remembered back then, is the 6th of June 1944, Operation Overlord; Second World War at least seemed interesting to me personally). Or genetics. Or social things. Or entrepreneurship. Or whatever.
I don't miss the school per se. I only wish I put up with crap back then, I wouldn't have to learn some this stuff right now the second time.
I still believe the subjects, the way we're taught, are devoid of meaning. To pick one example, physics and geography classes contain enough of knowledge for people to make smart decisions about complex subjects, which scales up in democracies to nation-level. Instead, we see e.g. young mothers boycotting the construction of nuclear power plant in Poland, or whatever. Society seems to be unaware as of where do we get power from, how much do we need, and why it is a damn important problem. People only complain about gasoline prices going up; but hell, if the society doesn't care (or, doesn't even understand enough to be able to care) about energy, how can it expect politicians to care? It's a lack of mental picture of issues the world is dealing with. And energy is only one example.
I remember being taught all those things in school; I didn't really understand anything back then, and I think most of the people didn't. Things like "renewable" / "not renewable" resources were to me like Lisp symbols. Their only meaning for me was in tests, like: (member 'coal renewable-resources); get it wrong, have 0 points. Somehow, between grades, tests and homework, the real meaning of things we learn got lost.
Anyway, I wish to go once again through the school material, this time for real, and try to extract some meaning out of it for myself and others around me.
Linguistics (psychological, pragmatics)
Anthropology (social, cultural)
History (Colonial, Victorian, social)
Psychology (social)
Etymology
Humanism (Renaissance)
Philosophy (Epistemology)
Libertarianism
Barter Economies
Generalism
Miscegenation
Languages (Romance)
Entrepreneurship
Technology Startups
Film (foreign, documentary)
Music (folk, world, classical)
Literature (fiction, creative nonfiction)
Coffee Houses
Salons
WWOOF
Wordplay
Photography
Curation
I used to study them all quite frequently but have stopped in the last few years without knowing why. Now I realize it's because I'm trying to justify knowledge vs. usefulness. Trying to get back to some of them now, though.
It's interesting that I have yet to find others who also like to learn about varied topics, outside of those who enjoy learning about technical topics. I guess that's why I'm a generalist (and why generalists are usually INTPs).
Brazil (10 years)
Spain (5 years)
Colombia (5 years)
Argentina (3 years)
Portugal (1 year)
Cuba (months)
Italy (months)
Germany (months)
Australia (months)
LANGUAGES
Brazilian Portuguese (fluent, self-taught)
Spanish (semi-fluent, self-taught)
Italian (intermediate, self-taught)
French (basic, self-taught)
German (attempted)
Swedish (attempted)
Russian (attempted)
Catalan (attempted)
In my case, I try to keep realistic dates of completion (considering that I'm no longer an undergraduate and right now I can focus in any topic I want.)
Sometimes it's difficult to get things done if you don't have someone behind telling you what to do next; but I realized, that if you master this skill, you are at a whole new level. I think this is the type of motivation that keeps moving the PhD students or the entrepreneurs.
At the moment I'm learning how to program for the Android platform, and this mobile paradigm has open my mind for a lot of things. I really want to pursue more this area.
I think it's a great idea that if you don't understand something in a book, tutorial, etc. investigate about those topics. But, never lose focus in what you are trying to accomplish in the first time; I know that sometimes it's tempting to keep checking that Math theory and things like that.
At the end, knowledge is another tool to get the job done.
Inspirational articles go into either Instapaper (URLs) or iBooks (PDFs), I read through these when I'm offline. If they sound interesting, I make a note in OmniFocus' inbox. (The new 'Share' button in Instapaper can do this automatically.)
When processing OF, I turn those things into a task in "Weekend Projects" - a list of things I want to toy around with for a weekend (or any other two free days).
When I hve started said projects, I flesh them out to be normal GTD projects and see where they go from there.
If something gets stuck and obsoleted before I have a chance to work on it again, I kill it in my Weekly Review.
I keep all of my ebooks in my ipad and have library, active, and completed sections. I have four books in my active section that I read through as time goes on and every time I complete a topic I pop a book from active onto completed and push another into my active section. I found I was shifting too quickly between books whenever I got disinterested or the material got tough and I would never pick them up again until weeks later which gave me very little context for what I was learning. Finishing books and being able to review them gives you much more closure on topics and makes you retain the material better. By having four I still allow myself to shuffle a bit but it reminds me to force my way though the hard parts when a book's been sitting there too long. Maybe once a month I'll map out my interests and try and find books pertaining to them and add them to my collection. Most of the major publishers have good daily deals on ebooks, and my library has a really good collection of hard copy books when I'm strapped for cash.
I did this about three months ago and have been laser focused on learning ever since instead of spreading myself too thin as it's too easy in this industry. I hope this doesn't sound like I'm tooting my own horn, but I genuinely hope everyone takes 10 minutes out of their week to do this for themselves. I can attest to this simple exercise being very much worth it.
I feel the same way. It wasn't until now that I realized my learning "hitlist" was really a histogram at heart. However, instead of tick marks I use list item comments. I also have to add that formatting my notes well (I use html) is essential--otherwise I'll avoid reviewing them.
I've written several of these lists in Evernote over the past few years. It's always interesting to go back and look at them to see how my interests have changed over time. Three years ago, my number one priority was to learn how to write short stories (and eventually a novel). Now my number one priority is to learn Clojure (and a handful of other technologies).
What I do is revise the list every week and see what things on the list I still want to learn, so I practice the ones that have prevailed more than 2 weeks and the other ones I kinda question them. What has worked for me this year is always ask "WHY ?" , Why do I want to learn A, or B, and if the reason is strong enough then the item goes in ink.
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.
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.
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.
I order all my 'stuff to learn' under a category in my Getting Things Done (GTD) workflow. I use Due Today for Android and Toodledo online (they sync automatically), and a bunch of paper scraps to transfer from whereever it is that I want to record things until I can enter them into the One True repository.
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?
That software already exists and is called org-mode :)
Some reasons to use org-mode:
* Org-mode is part of Emacs, so you can extend it in Lisp. If you so desired, you could record your weight each morning by sending yourself an email and scheduling an Emacs function... But someone has probably already done that in the 35 years of Emacs' existence. If not, Emacs macros are very easy to write, because they emulate the actions you would take yourself. (See my 9 liner for incrementally searching for keyboard shortcuts: https://github.com/aantn/castle/blob/master/home/.emacs.d/cu...)
* All org files are plain text
* All "items" in org files are part of a foldable hierarchy
* All items can be tagged
* TODOs are really just items whose headline starts with "TODO". Org-mode adds features for toggling, finding, and visualizing them
Sure, but what I need to do then is to write a semi-automated converter which just shoves everything with a clear tag formulation into org-mode and asks me what to do with the rest.
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 struggled to recall information by bookmarking and tagging three thousand websites in delicious. Nothing worked and I was on the verge of giving up for sanity's sake and just emailing myself reminders and notes.
Then I discovered org-mode and took control. I can recall and store any information in seconds. Org mode can do absolutely everything. Ask and you shall learn.