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Today marks the third day of the learning journey. While there’s not much visible progress for me to write about, I’ve been observing myself and how my energy levels affect my mental throughput throughout the day. It’s one of those investigatons I feel would yield helpful insights so that I can properly work through learning materials that I have hoarded over the past three days.
I thought I was more of a strict night owl, so I initially scheduled my study sessions during the evening after spending a little bit of time winding down after work. However, I did not account how much inertia I would need to break free to perform cognitive tasks such as solving equations or writing code to programatically solve equations.
That small tidbit of insight proved to be helpful. As it saved me from undue frustration where I would have wasted time staring at an exercise problem only to give up shortly after because I was too tired from a work day.
For me to achieve this goal I need to be both strategic and tactical. As well as practice discipline, and keep myself accountable for my actions and reactions. Proper introspection and self-reflection are also habits that I must adopt.
If I skipped this critical step where I observe my capacity, investigate both the weak and strong points. Or even failing to prepare myself against the hurdles that I would inevitably encounter. I know I would turn-tail, or even just give up.
Sun Tzu once said, “A soldier’s spirit is keenest in the morning; by noonday it has begun to flag; and in the evening, his mind is bent only on returning to camp.”
It goes without saying, that I need to take advantage of every free time that presents itself. Whether it appears before the sun rises, or, during the dark of night. I shall not keep myself away from studying as much as I can with what little time I have.
And so I came up of the most practical solution. When winding down for the night, I would gather cues after skimming through a chapter or writing down notes after going through a section or subsection within the same chapter. Or even following worked examples, and solving what exercise problems I can. Given enough consistency, this would be a great habit to maintain.
However, in the case where I’m totaly wiped out, I just need 5 minutes to see what I can or can not do. And just write down a physical sticky note where I stopped.
The section above involves making proper use of circumstance so that I can succeed in this learning journey. Now, I’ll see if I truly understand how to make proper use of my environment to push me even further.
Our immediate environment dictates how we live, operate, and even how we feel. If the space I use to study is messy, distractions are sure to follow. If it is tidy and organized, it invites productivity.
I’m not going to lie, keeping my desk and the immediate vicinty clean is another challenge on its own for me. While I’m proactively ensuring its tidy and organized, sometimes I’m just too wiped out to make it happen. Its another habit that I really need to be consisten with.
I was on the market for some items that I thought would help me with that. But I just realized, if I don’t use those items properly, the mess would just keep piling up and I would have more clutter in my way and therefore more distractions.
So to make proper use of space, I need to practice more discipline in keeping my surroundings clean and organized as well. Whether or not I have those organizers or other items that I was looking at.
But now I question myself, do I really need those? Is it better to keep what I have down to a minimum? After all, the less things I have to maintain, the more time I’ll have to keep working on what I want to do.
This brings me to another point I need to consider. I have quite a sizeable hoard of ebooks and physical textbooks related to software development, computer science and mathematics.
I often catch myself browsing for books that I feel like would be a great resource for the future that I never really got the chance to read yet. Some books I haven’t even touched since I bought it.
With the variety of referrence and resource materials, its safe to assume that I might find it easy to draw up my own research library. But that is not the case. The “digital bookcase” needs some more organization, but for now I will just have to isolate both the physical and digital textbooks that I will be using throughout the whole venture.
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