Scott H Young

From the Web

Tons of great articles in the past week:

The Martini Method for Productivity - A great review of the difference between hard and soft deadlines. Plus a famous author’s method for being productive.

Run Your Life Like a Fortune 500 Company - Ramit Sethi uses some great examples to point out the importance of measuring. I’m a stats addict when it comes to getting real data for the important metrics of life (how much you eat, read, sleep, work, etc.) If you don’t measure you don’t know–period.

Time Arbitrage- Not all time was created equally. Cal Newport goes over the importance of time arbitrage when scheduling your day.

Never Check E-Mail Again - Could it really be possible? Tim Ferriss demonstrates his system for cutting out e-mail clutter from his life.

New Research in Procrastination - In another great article over at Study Hacks, Cal writes about new research that shows procrastination is less about willpower and more about energy. I couldn’t agree more.

From the Archives

How to Give Up Television - When I wrote this article I was off the tube for about six months completely. Today I’d watch less than an hour of television per week. The article goes further trying to explore how to cut the wasted viewing hours, or eliminate them altogether.

From the Shelf

The Singularity is Near - Will biological intelligence become obsolete in 2050? This, along with other major changes, is the future predicted by inventor and technology genius Ray Kurzweil. He predicts that AI will soon eclipse human beings in intelligence and have the tools to accelerate its own thinking. The message of the book is optimistic, however, as one source he cites claims: “The robots will inherit the earth. But, they will be our children.” Even more, as Kurzweil claims, they will be us.

I’m sure most people are familiar with a to-do list. If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, hopefully you have at least one of these on the go, tracking your tasks on paper. But do you have a to-learn list? I recently decided my self-education system needed a bit of cleaning, so creating a to-learn list seemed like a natural result.

If you’re reading a few books a month, you’re already way ahead of most people. But just because you feel you’re doing better than average doesn’t justify a poorly organized approach to teaching yourself. I’ve set up a to-learn list as a way to ensure that the best books are at the top of my stack, not just the ones with the most current hype.

Benefits of a To-Learn List

I’ve just started with this to-learn list but already some of the benefits I see:

1. Focus on great ideas versus the most popular ones. It’s easy to buy books only from the front of a bookstore. Saving your ideas can get you to push into different subjects that might take more searching.
2. Split up your interests. If your self-education isn’t organized, it is easy to pick your favorite subjects even if 90% of the book’s material is old. Keeping a to-learn list allows you to explore subjects that are on the fringe of your current understanding.
3. Create a more varied reading diet. Keeping a to-learn list can help you balance fiction with non-fiction, science with literature and blend different types of books so your reading list doesn’t get stale.

To-Learn Versus To-Do

A to-learn list can’t work the same as a to-do list for a number of reasons. The biggest is simply that a to-do list typically involves things that must be done. Going to work, cleaning your house and picking up the dry cleaning are all necessary. In theory at least, each to-do item you check off means one less to do.

Not so with a to-learn list. Each book you learn opens up the possibility for more learning. If you make a typical checklist format for your to-learn, then it could easily explode in size far faster than you could ever read.

Instead of a checklist, my to-learn list has two parts. The first is a huge brainstorm where I’ve written down everything I want to read and learn from Shakespeare to cognitive psychology, martial arts to being fluent in Hindi. This entire pool of ideas is unmanageable as a list, but it gives me a solid base to work from the next time I need to get more books.

The second part is a stack of about 5-7 ideas I want to chew through next. This is a little over a months worth of reading, and about the size I would need to take from the library or bookstore.

Bookmark It!

Whenever I get an idea for a subject I’d like to learn more about or an author I haven’t read yet, I write down those ideas on my notepad. I can then add this to my to-learn pool for more ideas of books I could read in the future.

To-Read Versus To-Learn

A to-read list is a good idea, but it only encompasses one form of self-education. Keeping a to-learn list means you also need to add in subjects and ideas that you can’t get from a book. Cooking, martial arts and foreign languages can’t be grabbed entirely off the page.