Home Archive Trilium Notes About

Trying "Things to learn" and "Documented systems"

Posted on 2018-09-11

It’s been a long silence for me on this homepage. Stuff has been happening, but somehow I didn’t find the time to write much.

I’m trying out a new thing. I have a lot of stuff I want to learn some day, but I don’t have the time to learn all of it (and often I also don’t have the leftover energy to do personal-development type stuff, but that is another problem). I’ve had a bunch of systems to remember the interesting things I want to learn - a file on my disk, then a more complex file on my disk, then my laptop crashed, then Google Keep.

So the new thing I’m trying is that I’m adding a new page here called Things to learn. When I find a new thing I want to deeply understand some day, I write it into the list. And when I (some day) feel like diving into a thing, I will pick one up from the list, spend a bunch of time learning it, and then I’ll write a thing, put it on my website and link it from there.

Why this might be good:

Let’s see how it goes.

Documented systems

Oh by the way, there is a more general thing I’ve been trying which I think might be useful for me.

So CFAR teaches this thing they call “systematization”. (CFAR - Putting Names on Things ™) Examples are:

Systems are useful, because they standardize things. Preparing a flight checklist once and then following it 10 times is easier than figuring out if there’s anything important you’re forgetting 10 times at different occassions.

I have a few systems. They have come to be mostly “on their own”, and I might not remember the reason they turned out the way they are.

I want to try making my systems explicit - by writing down a documentation for what each system looks like, what problems does it solve, and such. I want that because:

The way I think of it right now is to have a “source code for my systems”, sort of. Right now I have a like 5-page Google doc with a mix of where things go in my apartment, how to pack for things, and where things go in my backpack, and the motivation and open problems for each.