varunpramanik

#4: Week Mapping and A Theory Of Learning

I was first introduced to the idea of mapping your week listening to Cortex. In episode #24, Grey shares a hand-drawn version of an ideal two-week calendar for himself. I had never thought before about this way to sketch out and set expectations for how you would like your week to progress.

I took a few stabs at it in the past, but hand-drawing out a calendar got a bit too tedious for my liking, as did finding the best way to represent different blocks of time. I tried using a highlighter tool with different colors, but ran into the problem of remembering with ease what each color meant. It also didn’t help that it was only really easy to review that calendar on my iPad Pro and that OneNote is a bit too infuriatingly slow for my sanity.

I fell out of that practice after around two or three weeks, but recently came back around to the idea and took a different approach. Instead of drawing everything by hand, I created a simple spreadsheet in Numbers that uses conditional formatting and COUNTIF functions to assist in visualizing and thinking through a weekly plan. I will caution that I just created this spreadsheet as a method of approaching weekly planning on Sunday, so I have no idea if it will stick. That being said, you may download a Numbers or Excel template here and see an example fleshed out plan in the screenshot below (the example is included in the templates).

I touched on the topic of a theory of learning in a previous blog post. Currently, I’m reading two books by Tim Ferriss, as well as posts by Tim Urban about the way the brain works. While mulling over their topics, I spelled out a simple theory of learning as laid out below:

Stop selling yourself short. Your number one action item is to overcome learned helplessness. I’ve met so many people who are capable of doing great work, but who for reasons unknown decide to draw a line for themselves in pursuing some challenge (“I’m not good at math”, “I don’t have your brain”, “That’s not how my brain works”, etc). Those excuses are absolute nonsense. Your brain is what you make it. I first heard the metaphor of learned skills as software from Daniel Dennett. In most cases, you’re the only person standing in your way. You’ve learned to be helpless and you may not even realize it. To understand more about learned helplessness, I encourage you to watch Veritasium’s excellent video on the subject.
Pursue intellectual curiosities. I’m optimistic. I believe most people have one or two complex subjects they’d like to understand better. As for why people don’t pursue them, I don’t want to speculate too much. I suspect part of the reason is that many people don’t know where to start and/or expect to master the subject in one sitting, so they wait for some ideal time when some bolt of inspiration shoots down from the clouds and hits them in the chest. Don’t wait. If you’re interested in space, try browsing some space-related articles occasionally. Maybe look up a YouTube video or two. Be constantly dipping your toes in the water. One day, you may just go down a rabbit hole to learn something fascinating. Over time, you cumulatively build your understanding of a subject.
Question everything. Turn everything you read and think you know over in your head. Poke it. Change some variables and see if your ideas hold up. Most importantly, don’t overestimate your own genius. You will be wrong often. That’s ok.
Give yourself tough learning projects. Point #2 above is about feeding your brains bits of intellectual food over time to keep it churning. Learning isn’t just about snacking, though. To truly push yourself forward, you need to immerse yourself in a tough learning project such as picking up casual familiarity with a new language, learning to code in Python to automate the boring stuff, or understanding what the “stock market” is. When pursuing such a project, it’s especially helpful to think about Elon Musk’s analogy of knowledge as a tree. When things get hard, map everything out and try to figure out where your branch or trunk isn’t as strong as it needs to be to hold up the more complex knowledge that builds from it. Ask questions about that stop gap and try to immerse yourself in any answers you can find. Give multiple explanations and media a shot. You never know what will make the concept stick (one person’s special metaphor, a certain pace of explanation, a set of diagrams, a snide remark, etc). That’s how Tim Urban approaches researching topics for his excellent posts (the whole interview is great, but start at 28:40 for his learning process in particular).

#3: Spreadsheets As Notebooks

My job requires me to manage spend and keep within budget allocations across a complex assortment of paid search campaigns. These budgets aren’t tiny (high 6 digits to 7 digits) and spend isn’t always predictable (dependent on customer demand). Missing our spend targets by 1%, or even 0.1%, can lead to all sorts of headaches (1% of $1 million = $10,000; imagine unintentionally spending $10,000 more than you were told to).

Given the above context, I think I’m fairly justified in being anally retentive in my money math. I try to be triple-sure that I have all the right numbers in front me before I make a decision or recommendation. Over time, I’ve come to treat spreadsheets as complex notebooks, combining tables, functions, screenshots, shapes and notes in a messy-but-intelligible complete representation of my thought process, verification steps and calculations.

Below is a quick illustrative example I threw together to show how I treat a spreadsheet as a notebook.

Numbers may be better suited to moving around chunks of information on a “canvas” of a spreadsheet:

Over the last year or so, I’ve tried to stop being as inflexible as I used to be in the tools I use and the ways I use those tools. I’m trying to be more pragmatic in order to get tasks done as efficiently and correctly as possible at the end of the day. This spreadsheet-as-a-notebook approach has certainly been helpful in my work and personal lives, especially when working with lots of information that needs to be understood and manipulated within a nuanced context.

#2: Learning Strategies For Complex Topics

I’ve only relatively recently begun devoting some measure of thought to the most effective strategies to learn about (more specifically, to gain an intuitive understanding of) complex subjects.

The Indian education system I grew up studying within had a pretty rigid prescription for how subjects would be taught and knowledge would be tested: rote memorization, set-in-stone definitions, dont-question-a-damn-thing mindsets, regurgitate-the-textbook-on-paper examinations. That’s not to say that I didn’t have some good teachers, but rather that even the best among them were hamstrung by the limits of the system.

When I began studying at TCU, I received my first dose of a different approach to learning. My professors engaged us in conversations rather than merely telling us what was right and wrong. Over the years, I came to believe I preferred a spoken voice walking me through a complex subject rather than reading paragraphs in a book. We all our special in our own way, after all, and my snowflake brain was built to gain knowledge through my ears rather than my eyes.

I now believe I was wrong back then. Over the last two or three years, my approach has started focusing on a different theory of learning—one that Elon Musk laid out in a Reddit AMA. To quote him: “Frankly, though, I think most people can learn a lot more than they think they can. They sell themselves short without trying. One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.”

Contextualizing the process of learning with the analogy of a tree was a real eye-opener for me. I’ve tried to approach any new learning challenge (for example, learning to code with C#/.NET for work a few months ago) with this perspective in mind. It seems so obvious now.

To this end, I’ve tried to be as fluid as possible in the media I consume and methods I practice to gain this knowledge. Returning to the topic of learning C#/.NET, I combined watching YouTube tutorial videos, reading Microsoft’s developer documentation, reviewing pre-existing code from the team, and plain old trial and error to complete the tasks I was assigned.

Earlier, I was listening to Tim Ferriss’ excellent interview with Tim Urban. Wait But Why is a downright excellent publication by Tim Urban, having been really helpful in teaching me about brain-computer interfaces, the Fermi Paradox and more. He absolutely nails the tree-building approach to helping his readers gain an understanding of these very complex topics.

In the aforementioned interview, Tim Urban lays out his approach to researching topics. In essence, he starts with Wikipedia to gain a rough overview of a topic and idea of where the “walls” are for related information. He then proceeds to do general searches around the topic, reading, watching, listening to or otherwise consuming as many search results as possible. Through this approach, he grows and re-enforces his understanding of the topic by hearing different explanations, perspectives and opinions. Some of the sources he stumbles upon may provide incomplete or inaccurate information, but even these help him gain an insight into the kinds of conversations that exist around the topic.

It’s fascinating to hear this approach to researching and learning about complex topics, especially since the end results are so startlingly good. Further, hearing this from Tim Urban in the interview gives us a well fleshed-out idea of how to approach building our semantic trees of knowledge.

#1: This Blog, Personal Efficiency, Back to the Mac

Top of mind, my reason for creating this new blog. I’ve been thinking about improving the way I approach tasks. Namely, I want to get better at taking small steps on a regular basis that build up to meeting a bigger goal. I don’t know if I realistically would publish some long work of writing, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility. It wouldn’t hurt, if I find the interest and motivation in the future, to have had some routine practice writing and expressing my thoughts.

Further, I want to test a new way to keep track of my daily thoughts. I primarily want to give myself the ability to review what past-me had on his mind, facilitating future-me’s decisions. I won’t be publishing my deepest darkest secrets here, just broader topics I have on my mind. I don’t expect people to follow along with anticipation, but if anyone finds reading my posts here interesting, I wouldn’t be unhappy about it.

I intend to publish here more frequently than on Chronicles. The scope of that blog is different: a place for me to share useful resources and learning experiences I find pursuing projects. I expect this new blog to be more raw and not quite as useful to people besides me.

I’m thinking about ways to improve my personal efficiency. My time is fixed and limited, so the important choice for me is in how I spend my time. Listening to an episode of the Tim Ferriss show earlier, I heard an interesting distinction I’ll paraphrase here: the goal is not to do more of some task in the same amount of time (say, responding to more emails), but rather to decide on the most impactful parts of that task to spend time on (responding only to valuable emails and not wasting time on low/no-value emails).

Tim and Joel also discussed focusing on the 20% of things that lead to 80% of your unhappiness to identify ways to improve the quality of your life. I hadn’t thought about applying the 80-20 rule to that perspective, but it’s definitely got my mental gears turning.

For quite a while, I’ve been running my personal life almost exclusively on iOS devices. I loved using my iPad Pro for anything and everything I could. I had an aging mid-2012 MacBook Pro that was excruciatingly slow for even the simplest tasks, bolstering my preference for tackling personal tasks on my iPad.

Recently, I got a gorgeous new mid-2017 space grey MacBook Pro. This Mac has pulled me away from doing a lot of things on my iPad. Speed in the following three areas is the primary factor: performance, charging and task efficiency.

On the performance front, this Mac has an SSD, which plays a huge role in making things lightning fast (and solving the problem that made me deign to use my old Mac). I haven’t had this device stutter or drop frames even when I’ve had multiple resource hogging apps running at once (think Chrome, Excel, Word, Firefox and more).

I wasn’t anticipating my experience charging this device, but it benefits tremendously from USB-C fast charging. Several times, I’ve done a double-take after having plugged in my Mac for a short while because the battery percentage will have massively jumped up. It charges much faster than any other device I have, including the aforementioned iPad Pro with a USB-C to Lightning cable plugged in. Given the tremendous capabilities of this device, it feels great to know that battery life is effectively a non-issue because I can charge it in a snap.

Finally, task efficiency. It pains me to say this as someone who invested so much effort in and very much enjoyed working through an iOS-based task workflow, but I’ll be damned if I don’t say that I’m still much more efficient at completing all sorts of large and small tasks on my Mac.

All of this is not to say my iPad is sitting unloved somewhere in a dusty corner. I actually have it right by me and am figuring out its place in my life. The strongest urges pulling me back to it are the ability to use an Apple Pencil to physically flesh out thoughts in handwriting, and a more comfortable reading experience.