The Process I Use To Learn New Things

If you’ve spent any amount of time trying to speed up your learning process you’ve likely heard of some well-known techniques:

→ Feynman Technique

→ Active Recall

→ Interleaving

But, one strange feature I’ve noticed when it comes to learning is that at times the most gains come from doing simple things that aren’t quite so related to the learning process itself.

In this article I want to show you an example of such a case, but before I do that I want to get into a short personal story.

When I started my self-study challenge back in the middle of 2020, I remember spending the first month collecting concepts from different resources and copying explanations word for word into my notes so that I could use them later (You can find some of these on my website)

But, in doing so I was left with little time to learn what was important, and I ended up not using the notes that much.

I needed a solution to this mess. And I found it.

It’s a type of planner that has now developed from its earlier stages- writing down what I learned, into something more advanced.

I call it the Self-Learner Planner.

It consists of 3 components:

• Content

• Tracking

• Planning

Content:

This involves keeping track of:

• What you learned

• When you learned it

At the end of each day, have a file of what you’ve learned (concepts, facts, etc…) with a label of the date when you learned it (this second part will be important for when you decide to do spaced repetition)

Tracking:

What’s your retention like?

What’s your problem-solving accuracy like?

How fluid is your understanding?

These are all questions that help you keep track of how well you learned something- of course, there are many other metrics you could keep track of, but those 3 are good ones to start with.

The reason for doing this is that you’ll gather enough information to inform yourself on what to focus on in the planning section.

Planning:

What are you going to learn? (Which concepts, facts, ideas…)?

How are you going to learn it? (What techniques are you going to use)?

How are you going to test yourself to make sure you learned it?

These are the 3 questions I ask myself when planning a new learning session. My answers will also depend on how well I learned previous material and the new material that I need to learn.

At a holistic level, here’s what the Self-Learner Planner looks like:

Plan Session → Do the session → Gather Learned Content → Track learning metrics → Use these metrics to plan your next learning session → Repeat

Try this out the next time you find yourself self-studying a topic. I promise you it will make things so much easier.

Until next time,
Diego