20 ms·

I've realized that most of my tendencies to set up elaborate note-taking systems and frameworks have been an attempt to address my anxiety around learning and p

by udbhavs 2mo ago

I've realized that most of my tendencies to set up elaborate note-taking systems and frameworks have been an attempt to address my anxiety around learning and productivity. I'm constantly in the mode of "learning defensively" - questioning what I'm absorbing into my mental toolkit, how much I retain, and how much I'd be able to conjure if I needed to solve a problem in that domain. In this context, noting down whatever I come across in Obsidian canvases or webs of interlinked notes or making Anki flash cards gives me some comfort about what I'm doing, and of course satisfies the urge of organizing and categorizing things. But when I relate these activities to learning itself, it becomes difficult to gauge how much of it is necessary. If I don't constantly serialize or test what I'm learning, how do I know I'm learning anything at all? And externalizing so much starts to feel like a burden and gives me less confidence in my own intrinsic ability to just go and do things. I was going to post an "Ask HN" on this topic to see if other people related to this. If anyone has been in this mindset before and managed to break out of it, I'd be curious to know what helped!

bluGill 2mo ago
What is the goal? That needs to start all conversations in this area. Not everyone had the same goals. Second, what is your specific problems? Again not everyone had the same problems. There are common problems with common solutions (often multiple conflicting solutions that work in isolation but perhaps not for your life), learning what works for others can thus be helpful. Beware, not all problems are big enough to be worth addressing for you. The important part is find what works for you. Sometimes you don't need to measure what you learned - which seems to be your concern- if it is important and you learned it you will remember when needed. Of not you need to look it up again. It can be liberating to realize that you don't need to measure everything. Sometimes that isn't good enough though, so back to the first two questions.
- udbhavs 2mo ago
  > That needs to start all conversations in this area. Not everyone had the same goals. That's a very good question. In my case, when learning in the mode I described above, my brain is often more worried about the amount of unknown stuff versus focusing on what I am working on at the moment. With that, learning starts to feel like a burden and leads to burnout (even though I enjoy solving problems). I can become closed off to new information, and disheartened at everything I don't know. The problem I'd like to solve is being able to retain excitement about learning while working on projects without it feeling like an obligation. There are probably more base issues to address for this (eg. being less controlling of outcomes). And there's particularly a lot of doubt now that AI coding is the norm, and I feel uncomfortable with moving faster because I feel attached to all the details. That has turned the debate much larger about what anyone really needs to know if they can blitz through stuff at the speed of prompting.
cocoa19 2mo ago
Can confirm. Say what you will about Tim Ferris, but maybe he was onto something when he said only learn the bare minimum to get something done and more than that is a waste (4 hour workweek).
- al_borland 2mo ago
  He says that, but in practice he ends up learning everything he can, in order to try and figure out the bare minimum to keep doing.
mm351206 2mo ago
I'm starting to break out of this mentality by noticing that 1. I excelled at my exams without any strange note taking systems; 2. I remember many details down the road, even things I thought I had forgotten. For example, I needed some Linear Algebra, and I was surprised by how much I recalled after 10 years, so much in fact that in 3 days I was on par with when I passed my exam. It would have been worth it to make an Anki flashcard for every theorem? 3. In the exam I used such method I just needed much more time that when I used my minimalist note taking. So much in fact that I question the efficiency of such methods.
galaxyLogic 2mo ago
Well if you write down a snippet of code, and later upi reliaze you need that code a gain but don't remember it but do remember that you must have written a note about it, then writing down the note was useful. The issue I'm still working on is how do I find such notes when I don't exactly remeber what they were about.
- kashunstva 2mo ago
  > how do I find such notes when I don't exactly remeber what they were about I can't claim to have solved that; but I do have a personal rule about notes. I don't create a note unless (1) I'm willing to endow it with at least some metadata, and (2) I'm willing to manually link it to another note so that I've at least dropped one breadcrumb.
jokellum 2mo ago
I don't know your specifics, so I'm going to reply with what I've learned about learning: I found reading a textbook, and typing notes into a dumb markdown file with the textbooks name is good enough. Typically: definitions, quotes, and personal thoughts while reading. Did this for stats/comp sci/etc. Obsidian + markdown worked for that, even without plugins. Being able to text search is useful, which is why I don't hand write. Anything beyond that you have to be cautious about paralyzing yourself from trying XYZ PKM. Theres a quote from stephen king that goes somewhere along the lines of "during first draft don't try referencing or fixing grammar because it breaks your train of thought". I think similarly, when learning something, choose the thing thats most out of the way (usually the simplest) that is least likely to break your train of thought. In terms of tracking how much you're learning, I'd be very very slow and incremental in what tooling/methods you pick. For me, I just trust myself after reading/notetaking a textbook. Usually homeworks get very easy which is a good sign. Being able to explain what I learned to someone else is a good sign.
- enos_feedler 2mo ago
  I would add that writing down your reactions to the books and not the book content itself is helpful. If something reminds you of something else then write about that. I mostly throw away all these things as the point is just to write them not to read them back
- udbhavs 2mo ago
  Great advice, thanks! > Usually homeworks get very easy which is a good sign I agree, but having homeworks in itself is a big advantage! It means you're in a structured learning environment where someone has taken the care to create a learning path and added checkpoints with carefully designed problems designed to refresh + assess what you've absorbed until that point. When you're learning outside the classroom (for yourself or on the job), there's this sudden loss of all bounds where you now also have to draw a line of what knowledge is reasonable to acquire and what is out of scope. For example, when working independently on personal projects, I sometimes get sucked into reading about the details of protocols, standards, RFCs etc. and have a difficult time deciding when to stop. One answer is learn just enough to solve the problem at hand at move on, but if you're in a field like eg. security you feel an obligation to do your due diligence when designing something. And of course, with LLMs now it's possible to move past any problem without learning anything at all, so you have to be even more intentional in which things you do decide to learn.
watwut 2mo ago
> how do I know I'm learning anything at all? I keep "proofs" of past performance. Like a drawing or a name of netflix series I barely understood or a text I wrote. Once in months, I check that stuff and see myself understand the series better, see that I do better pictures etc etc. When I feel anxiety, I check old stuff and compare it to the new stuff. It brings pleasure.
wolvoleo 2mo ago
Wow you take learning methodology so seriously. When it comes to learning (or in fact pretty much anything) I really hate structure. I thrive in chaos. When I want to learn something I just start and fill in knowledge gaps where I need, and just roll with it, and if I fall and make mistakes it's ok. If I don't retain something I don't care, it must not have been important and I can always pick it up again. For this reason I deeply hate formal certifications especially in IT. It's too much jumping through stupid hoops as well as the world according to <vendor>. But I'm still known as one of the most knowledgeable people in the company because I'm always building stuff and jumping on new things. But lately I find IT to be becoming really rigid. We have all this governance and iso bullshit in work now where they want us to be certified before we can even start on something. I've been able to duck out of it most of the time by jumping on side projects but in the end I probably need to move to a smaller company that isn't so much into all the overhead. Ps I do admire people who can be so structured. I just can't be like that. I have heavy ADHD which is probably the main cause :) But it's interesting to hear.
- udbhavs 2mo ago
  It is funny, I like reading about standards and certifications! I'm definitely more on the anxious side which leads to information hoarding tendencies and trying to think as much as I can before I act. I would love to get pulled a bit in your direction and be a bit more trigger-happy with making decisions and putting out things.
  - wolvoleo 2mo ago
    Be careful what you wish for :) It did give me the reputation of being a cowboy. It has to match your personality otherwise I'm sure it will make you feel uncomfortable and out of control. However it also seems to tie me to projects that nobody else wants because the path forward is not clear or they are deemed unsafe bets, which means I have a lot more agency as most of the management and oversight also doesn't want to link their names to it too closely :) Which is exactly what I want. I noticed a lot of people get more conservative in their approach as they move up in their career. Probably because they have more to lose. For me having challenging and interesting work is more important than my career path. And I am pretty successful with my approach meaning results. I always feel like if there is a way to do something I will find it and that generally does end up being the case. At work it's becoming a harder and harder fit though as governance processes ramp up. In personal projects I'm even more like this and I do end up not finishing many of them. It is what it is. I do find that brainstorming with a good AI model can help the momentum going though. I know several projects I have hardly progressed with until I started doing that.
belZaah 2mo ago
The process itself is necessary, not the notes. I used to take notes in classes and meetings. At some point I realized I never read them because they were illegible. No structure, bad handwriting, just key words, no sentences. What I do now is play cards on my phone. It performs the same function of keeping my mind focused on the conversation rather than wandering off. I’ve learned to combine this with focused note-taking where I write down specific things to remember: tasks, facts, significant statements. But it’s the process that allows me to focus, the notes or gazillion solitaire games completed are a side effect.
Towaway69 2mo ago
I think of myself as a thought hoarder - my anxieties center around not wanting to forget a thought, no thought left behind because I never know when that thought might (or might not) be useful. It becomes a problem of organising my thoughts so that I can find them and reconnect them and bundle them together into ideas. Which later might become understanding and wisdom. Obviously this is not nothing new, Zettelkasten is solving the exact the same problem. And through out history many collections of notes have been found and archived. These systems will benefit much from LLMs, purely for the organizational advantageous. I have taken another approach inspired by mind maps to create my own visual PKM[1]. It has become a giant scrapbook with notes, videos and imaginary, ideas and half-finished projects, and everything in-between. The advantage is that it's a giant visual program, it's a mind map created using a visual programming environment. I'm constantly extending it with new tooling to help me keep my thoughts in order. In the end, it's the tweeking at my scrapbook while adding to the scrapbook that then causes more tweeking until something arises that was expected but which is very much welcome. [1]: https://blog.openmindmap.org/blog/mind-maps-for-busy-minds https://blog.openmindmap.org/blog/mind-maps-for-busy-minds
ent001 2mo ago
First of all you need to decide your goal. Why are you reading, taking a course, or writing down anything, in the first place? Otherwise you're just gonna be doing busy work to feel like you're doing what you're supposed to. Do not suppose. Decide what you want to achieve and slice that into things you can do inside of a day. On the other hand, if you have nothing to achieve, anything goes. Just read, think about it, go for walks. Just don't get caught in between, busy and going nowhere.

by udbhavs 2mo ago

bluGill 2mo ago

What is the goal? That needs to start all conversations in this area. Not everyone had the same goals. Second, what is your specific problems? Again not everyone had the same problems. There are common problems with common solutions (often multiple conflicting solutions that work in isolation but perhaps not for your life), learning what works for others can thus be helpful. Beware, not all problems are big enough to be worth addressing for you. The important part is find what works for you. Sometimes you don't need to measure what you learned - which seems to be your concern- if it is important and you learned it you will remember when needed. Of not you need to look it up again. It can be liberating to realize that you don't need to measure everything. Sometimes that isn't good enough though, so back to the first two questions.

udbhavs 2mo ago
> That needs to start all conversations in this area. Not everyone had the same goals. That's a very good question. In my case, when learning in the mode I described above, my brain is often more worried about the amount of unknown stuff versus focusing on what I am working on at the moment. With that, learning starts to feel like a burden and leads to burnout (even though I enjoy solving problems). I can become closed off to new information, and disheartened at everything I don't know. The problem I'd like to solve is being able to retain excitement about learning while working on projects without it feeling like an obligation. There are probably more base issues to address for this (eg. being less controlling of outcomes). And there's particularly a lot of doubt now that AI coding is the norm, and I feel uncomfortable with moving faster because I feel attached to all the details. That has turned the debate much larger about what anyone really needs to know if they can blitz through stuff at the speed of prompting.

cocoa19 2mo ago

Can confirm. Say what you will about Tim Ferris, but maybe he was onto something when he said only learn the bare minimum to get something done and more than that is a waste (4 hour workweek).

al_borland 2mo ago
He says that, but in practice he ends up learning everything he can, in order to try and figure out the bare minimum to keep doing.

mm351206 2mo ago

I'm starting to break out of this mentality by noticing that 1. I excelled at my exams without any strange note taking systems; 2. I remember many details down the road, even things I thought I had forgotten. For example, I needed some Linear Algebra, and I was surprised by how much I recalled after 10 years, so much in fact that in 3 days I was on par with when I passed my exam. It would have been worth it to make an Anki flashcard for every theorem? 3. In the exam I used such method I just needed much more time that when I used my minimalist note taking. So much in fact that I question the efficiency of such methods.

galaxyLogic 2mo ago

Well if you write down a snippet of code, and later upi reliaze you need that code a gain but don't remember it but do remember that you must have written a note about it, then writing down the note was useful. The issue I'm still working on is how do I find such notes when I don't exactly remeber what they were about.

kashunstva 2mo ago
> how do I find such notes when I don't exactly remeber what they were about I can't claim to have solved that; but I do have a personal rule about notes. I don't create a note unless (1) I'm willing to endow it with at least some metadata, and (2) I'm willing to manually link it to another note so that I've at least dropped one breadcrumb.

jokellum 2mo ago

I don't know your specifics, so I'm going to reply with what I've learned about learning: I found reading a textbook, and typing notes into a dumb markdown file with the textbooks name is good enough. Typically: definitions, quotes, and personal thoughts while reading. Did this for stats/comp sci/etc. Obsidian + markdown worked for that, even without plugins. Being able to text search is useful, which is why I don't hand write. Anything beyond that you have to be cautious about paralyzing yourself from trying XYZ PKM. Theres a quote from stephen king that goes somewhere along the lines of "during first draft don't try referencing or fixing grammar because it breaks your train of thought". I think similarly, when learning something, choose the thing thats most out of the way (usually the simplest) that is least likely to break your train of thought. In terms of tracking how much you're learning, I'd be very very slow and incremental in what tooling/methods you pick. For me, I just trust myself after reading/notetaking a textbook. Usually homeworks get very easy which is a good sign. Being able to explain what I learned to someone else is a good sign.

enos_feedler 2mo ago
I would add that writing down your reactions to the books and not the book content itself is helpful. If something reminds you of something else then write about that. I mostly throw away all these things as the point is just to write them not to read them back
udbhavs 2mo ago
Great advice, thanks! > Usually homeworks get very easy which is a good sign I agree, but having homeworks in itself is a big advantage! It means you're in a structured learning environment where someone has taken the care to create a learning path and added checkpoints with carefully designed problems designed to refresh + assess what you've absorbed until that point. When you're learning outside the classroom (for yourself or on the job), there's this sudden loss of all bounds where you now also have to draw a line of what knowledge is reasonable to acquire and what is out of scope. For example, when working independently on personal projects, I sometimes get sucked into reading about the details of protocols, standards, RFCs etc. and have a difficult time deciding when to stop. One answer is learn just enough to solve the problem at hand at move on, but if you're in a field like eg. security you feel an obligation to do your due diligence when designing something. And of course, with LLMs now it's possible to move past any problem without learning anything at all, so you have to be even more intentional in which things you do decide to learn.

watwut 2mo ago

> how do I know I'm learning anything at all? I keep "proofs" of past performance. Like a drawing or a name of netflix series I barely understood or a text I wrote. Once in months, I check that stuff and see myself understand the series better, see that I do better pictures etc etc. When I feel anxiety, I check old stuff and compare it to the new stuff. It brings pleasure.

wolvoleo 2mo ago

Wow you take learning methodology so seriously. When it comes to learning (or in fact pretty much anything) I really hate structure. I thrive in chaos. When I want to learn something I just start and fill in knowledge gaps where I need, and just roll with it, and if I fall and make mistakes it's ok. If I don't retain something I don't care, it must not have been important and I can always pick it up again. For this reason I deeply hate formal certifications especially in IT. It's too much jumping through stupid hoops as well as the world according to <vendor>. But I'm still known as one of the most knowledgeable people in the company because I'm always building stuff and jumping on new things. But lately I find IT to be becoming really rigid. We have all this governance and iso bullshit in work now where they want us to be certified before we can even start on something. I've been able to duck out of it most of the time by jumping on side projects but in the end I probably need to move to a smaller company that isn't so much into all the overhead. Ps I do admire people who can be so structured. I just can't be like that. I have heavy ADHD which is probably the main cause :) But it's interesting to hear.

udbhavs 2mo ago
It is funny, I like reading about standards and certifications! I'm definitely more on the anxious side which leads to information hoarding tendencies and trying to think as much as I can before I act. I would love to get pulled a bit in your direction and be a bit more trigger-happy with making decisions and putting out things.
- wolvoleo 2mo ago
  Be careful what you wish for :) It did give me the reputation of being a cowboy. It has to match your personality otherwise I'm sure it will make you feel uncomfortable and out of control. However it also seems to tie me to projects that nobody else wants because the path forward is not clear or they are deemed unsafe bets, which means I have a lot more agency as most of the management and oversight also doesn't want to link their names to it too closely :) Which is exactly what I want. I noticed a lot of people get more conservative in their approach as they move up in their career. Probably because they have more to lose. For me having challenging and interesting work is more important than my career path. And I am pretty successful with my approach meaning results. I always feel like if there is a way to do something I will find it and that generally does end up being the case. At work it's becoming a harder and harder fit though as governance processes ramp up. In personal projects I'm even more like this and I do end up not finishing many of them. It is what it is. I do find that brainstorming with a good AI model can help the momentum going though. I know several projects I have hardly progressed with until I started doing that.

belZaah 2mo ago

The process itself is necessary, not the notes. I used to take notes in classes and meetings. At some point I realized I never read them because they were illegible. No structure, bad handwriting, just key words, no sentences. What I do now is play cards on my phone. It performs the same function of keeping my mind focused on the conversation rather than wandering off. I’ve learned to combine this with focused note-taking where I write down specific things to remember: tasks, facts, significant statements. But it’s the process that allows me to focus, the notes or gazillion solitaire games completed are a side effect.

Towaway69 2mo ago

I think of myself as a thought hoarder - my anxieties center around not wanting to forget a thought, no thought left behind because I never know when that thought might (or might not) be useful. It becomes a problem of organising my thoughts so that I can find them and reconnect them and bundle them together into ideas. Which later might become understanding and wisdom. Obviously this is not nothing new, Zettelkasten is solving the exact the same problem. And through out history many collections of notes have been found and archived. These systems will benefit much from LLMs, purely for the organizational advantageous. I have taken another approach inspired by mind maps to create my own visual PKM[1]. It has become a giant scrapbook with notes, videos and imaginary, ideas and half-finished projects, and everything in-between. The advantage is that it's a giant visual program, it's a mind map created using a visual programming environment. I'm constantly extending it with new tooling to help me keep my thoughts in order. In the end, it's the tweeking at my scrapbook while adding to the scrapbook that then causes more tweeking until something arises that was expected but which is very much welcome. [1]: https://blog.openmindmap.org/blog/mind-maps-for-busy-minds https://blog.openmindmap.org/blog/mind-maps-for-busy-minds

ent001 2mo ago

First of all you need to decide your goal. Why are you reading, taking a course, or writing down anything, in the first place? Otherwise you're just gonna be doing busy work to feel like you're doing what you're supposed to. Do not suppose. Decide what you want to achieve and slice that into things you can do inside of a day. On the other hand, if you have nothing to achieve, anything goes. Just read, think about it, go for walks. Just don't get caught in between, busy and going nowhere.