Why is learning effortful? Why do we struggle to learn calculus but easily learn our mother tongue? How can we make hard skills easier to learn? Cognitive load theory is a powerful framework from psychology for making sense of these questions. Cognitive load theory, developed in the 1980s by psychologist John Sweller, has become a […]

As the year ends, I thought I’d revisit some of my favorite entries from the past twelve months: The Productivity Frontier: Can You Get More Done Without Making Sacrifices? – How much more productivity can you squeeze out of your day? Is such a squeeze sustainable? Productivity enthusiasts like me often talk about systems to […]

In my quest to understand the nuts-and-bolts process of how we learn complex, valuable skills, I’ve read quite a few books on learning, teaching and skill acquisition. This batch of books challenged my thinking and changed my mind on quite a few things. I read these books to further investigate learning by doing and the […]

Say you need to learn a complicated skill: physics, French or computer programming. How much time should you spend building your background knowledge before you start practicing the actual skill? Consider machine learning. One way to learn this field would be to master first the underlying math. Then, when you encountered the programming commands for […]