The hard work of planning vs. the meditative work of doing
implementation intentions make it easy to then do the thing
coming up with training methods for deliberate practice is hard
To put this another way, a self-taught learner essentially has to do link not tracked and link not tracked, both of which are discrete skills themselves.
In sum, applying deliberate practice in service of our careers is way more challenging than Ericsson makes it appear. I find myself continuously struggling when putting his ideas to practice, and I really dislike the hundred and one self-help blog posts that parrot his findings without attempting to apply them. Deliberate practice in the sorts of skills that we rely on in our careers is hard, because coming up with effective training methods is hard.
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coming up with training methods for deliberate practice is hard^hard-to-apply-deliberate-practice-in-our-careers
titrating your environment so you have effective serendipity... Or just so it's easy to do the thing that you know you should do later
Related to this idea, there is a separate idea of brainstorming and ideation as part of some thing that is truly separate from work. One place to do that his end of week meetings where you don't have a bunch of work ahead of you, so you can think big picture. Another place to do it is on hikes where You are able to take off-line notes but you don't have access to a computer, so you can't actually add those notes. You can't actually do the hard work of integrating the notes more immediately.
The idea with Evergreen notes is to refill your cache with the previous ideas he had on the topic, but then to extend it as well.
step-by-step-guide-to-my-note-taking-techniques
Zoom in and out, like a DD cycle where do zoom way out and assess things like relationships, investments, career and skills, health, all of those things, but then you zoom in on specifics, too
The idea of gradual engagement with material...
At 26:00 Justin talks about the link not tracked that you can develop to link not tracked to a certain extent on something you would otherwise not be interested in learning. ^6d1007
Incipient thoughts as evergreen notes app links, for example. Some indication that your reading notes should become something greater. One way I do that is to create items that are on associated with anything but the original source material. They become TODOs. Those items shouldn't be potentially recontextualize . For example the atom can be re-interpreted when inserted elsewhere
(And yeah: I carefully write my tons of text on Twitter such that every single message is a carefully enough crafted thought that they could just about stand alone, which I think is actually good for the content.) ^can-stand-alone
Sometimes you do a first round of trying to pull links together. We may be looking for just the right structure, but actually maybe don't worry about that. Just ensure that ideas feel somewhat relevant to each other are linked together so that it will be easy to find them and explore them later. You can do this even when there is only an intuition that they will eventually coalesce into a coherent whole
Feels a bit like the difference between input and synthesis, but in the opposite direction. Input is easy. But actually it's important that she get the input into the directionally right places. But, there is the initial hard work of setting up those inputs, putting them on to the home screen is putting stuff into the directionally right place, etc. ^directionally-correct
We really need to understand the difference between when you have motivation and when you're done. For example right when you get a new book from Amazon, he will be excited. That's when you should set up an everything that will make it easy for you to continue to do the work that you should be doing throughout reading. What this means is making it extremely easy to take notes, for example.
It's a bit like walking through the grocery store after having made a shopping list
Or the separation between coding and refactoring
You might be game for doing the easier thing right now, because you don't have the will power to do the hard thing. But that is progress. When you have the willpower you should ensure that you have things that don't require the will power lined up for your future self
With ERDs the hard work has shifted earlier in the process.
"This leads to a very unintuitive feeling: it's… effectively free to memorize as many new cards as I can write? What? Which in turn means that for me, the real marginal cost is in the moment of writing a new card." ^marginal-cost-writing
And you'll have a semantic mental 'framework' (Gordon edit: knowledge schema) in your brain on which to then hang all the great things you learn from your reading, which makes it more likely that you'll retain that stuff as well. I read somewhere that Bill Gates structures his famous "reading weeks" around an outline of important questions he's thought about and broken down into pieces. e.g. he'll think about "water scarcity" and then break it down into questions like "how much water is there in the world?", "where does existing drinking water come from?", "how do you turn ocean water into drinking water", etc., and only then will he pick reading to address those questions. ^pre-questioning
Joe mentioned that airflow is a workflow engine. I realized I didn't understand what that meant in comparison to a data flow engine. Also, I am generally interested in workflows, and how a knowledge gathering, synthesis, and artifact creation process is comprised of a variety of different workflows. ^workflows
One thought I had is that this is a little bit like reading notes versus permanent notes. At a certain point you decide to invest more in some concept you came across while reading by turning it into a permanent note. This atomic thing that is a lot like Hey question. Once something is a question in space repetition there is an overhead associated with maintaining it and an emotional burden with deleting it. So maybe we should actually be careful about what goes in, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have things under pre-consideration. This sounds a little bit like the workflows I've been talking about this is a pre question workflow ^pre-question-workflow
The other idea here is queuing up media to consume, or getting enough evergreen notes together to create a rough draft of some article
not lacking motivation but clarity
This actually fits with the idea of various workflows that I've been thinking about. Also there's some thing easy that comes before planning, which is just the consumption of this stuff into simple notes that are not yet evergreen so reading notes or whatever
In someway the hard work of planning is a bit like preparing meson plus to make cooking easier in the future.
The interesting thing about microtasks is that they are so well defined that typically they don't take much effort to accomplish. That means that you could do them when you have relatively low fortitude. If you start your day during the most difficult work, as long as you have a bunch of clearly defined microtasks, you can accomplish those later in the day. ^microtasks-are-easier
What can you do that would make it easy to do the harder work? Can you make it small enough, or can you help to game if I the work? Can you make it very easy to review from your phone instead of your laptop so you can do it while lying down or I'm going to the bathroom? That type of thing
How can you get yourself to do the work? The workflows help a lot here because you can do a portion of the work without having to think about the overall work, but maybe also you could do something like talking to your phone general ideas that you could refer the review later.
At 39:00 Shane observes that the guy is link not tracked when he has the most willpower to protect himself against when he doesn't ^optimize-when-you-have-the-willpower