Learning Strategies

Learning Strategies #

Learning things fast #

Take Smart Notes #

Taking notes effectively is what I like to call a force multiplier. Over the long-run having an effective note taking methodology can pay back dividends multiple times over. After quite a bit of experimentation I’ve discovered a variation of the Zettelkasten note-taking system works best for my needs. When your body of notes becomes hundreds of pages or 1,000’s it’s important to have a system to search, make connections between concepts and ideas, and organize your notes.

Learn Markdown (Optional) #

After some experimentation with other text markups I’ve settled on using Markdown to write my notes. The syntax is intuitive and easily understood in plain-text. It also is designed to be easily rendered into HTML. This makes self-hosting my notes fairly straightforward. (This page is written in Markdown and self-hosted on my notes website)

Hand-written notes are preferred for memory retention and for some it’s easier to hand-write notes. But having a searchable notes database, and the ability to easily make links between notes, using a computerized system is preferred. Markdown is a widely supported syntax for authoring text-based notes. It’s relatively future proof in that there’s likely to be parsers and renderers available for it for quite some time.

A note-taking system that uses a collection of simple text files (i.e. Markdown files) is future proof in that you control your data. It’s not tied to some proprietary platform that may not still exist in 15-20 years. Roam Research (see link above) is an example of this kind of vendor lock-in.