The power of keeping a learn log

Most of us have little time to learn. But we're always learning, even in small bursts throughout the day. The question is: how can we remember the useful bits?

In this session, Ramses Oudt (community manager at Logseq) showcases how he captures what he learns. Using the power of outlines, links and queries, he's able to feed his brain and turn his notes into a personal wiki.

You'll learn in this session:

Best practices for writing in an outliner

Techniques for internalizing knowledge

Retrieving notes using queries

Talk outline

Who am I?

33. From Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

I'm a teacher by training, but switched to IT sales soon after college.

Taught myself sales.

Taking notes of every phone conversation I had, I moved from telemarketer to account manager to customer success manager.

Taught myself IT infrastructure.

Taking notes on everything I learned in my job, I was able to become a technical consultant specialized in systems integrations.

Learning how to learn is the highest leverage skill I've learned.

Why take notes?

To learn new topics

Continuous learning opens up career possibilities.

Learning can be a relaxing and rewarding activity in one.

To offload your thinking

If you're a professional, your mind is probably constantly overflowing.

Or in you're like me, you're likely getting overwhelmed.

Offloading bits of useful information will help your future self.

Why use Logseq?

Entering new notes is frictionless.

Best practice: use the daily Journals page for everything.

The outline structure makes organizing notes easy.

Collapse/expand help against my ADHD brain feeling overwhelmed.

Links make finding notes easy (linked references, queries).

Easy to turn notes into flashcards with a single hashtag (#card)

How to take good notes

Have questions you'd like to have answered

Have "12 favorite questions" you keep in mind when reading.

My approach to problem-solving is to carry around a dozen interesting problems, and a dozen interesting solutions to unrelated problems, and eventually, I’ll be able to make connections. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. — Richard Feynman

For example:

How can I improve my thinking to make better decisions?

What are my values?

What is my underlying philosophical framework?

What are my biases?

What mental models do top performers use?

How can I approach new ideas so they quickly benefit me and add a dimension/paradigm in my thinking?

What are the top techniques to remember and internalize knowledge?

What does my note-taking workflow look like?

What do I create with my notes?

How can I learn enough about development so I can create my own web apps to make my ideas reality?

What do I need to know about HTML?

Inspector

DOM

Accessibility

What do I need to know about CSS?

Selectors

Classes

Mobile support

The box model

Flexbox

Grid

Inheritance and cascade

Positions

Variables

Fonts

Transitions/animations

What do I need to know about JavaScript?

What do I need to know about frontend libraries?

What do I need to know about frameworks?

Throughout the day

Set up a template in your note-taking tool to quickly structure/tag/link your notes.

This will ensure you'll be able to find back your notes, or directly feed them into a process (e.g. a query with a backlog of notes to turn into flashcards).

Write everything on the daily Journals page.

This takes away the question: "Where should I store this?"

One idea per note

Apply the principle of atomicity, meaning that each note contains exactly one idea.

This will enable you to link it to other ideas, but makes memorizing your notes also much easier.

Explain in your own words

Helps you to check if you understood the idea.

Two Richard Feynman quotes:

If you can't explain something to a first year student, then you haven't really understood.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

Research shows that you're more likely to remember notes in your own words.

Why use spaced repetition with your notes?

Don't leave learning up to chance

We tend to take notes because we want to keep knowledge, but only revisiting an idea repeatedly will help to make it your own.

The single biggest change that Anki brings about is that it means memory is no longer a haphazard event, to be left to chance. Rather, it guarantees I will remember something, with minimal effort. That is, Anki makes memory a choice. Source: Augmenting Long-term Memory

Process knowledge much more deeply

When you write about something in your own words, you tend to elaborate/expand on the topic and connect it to what you already know (or your life in general).

[M]aking Anki cards is an act of understanding in itself. That is, figuring out good questions to ask, and good answers, is part of what it means to understand a new subject well. To use someone else's cards is to forgo much of that understanding. Indeed, I believe the act of constructing the cards actually helps with memory. Memory researchers have repeatedly found that the more elaborately you encode a memory, the stronger the memory will be. By elaborative encoding, they mean essentially the richness of the associations you form. Source: Augmenting Long-term Memory

Creativity stems from internalized knowledge

We can look up a lot of factual information, but you can't look up what you don't know.

Aren't external memory aids enough? One common criticism of systems such as Anki is that external memory devices – systems such as Google, wikis, and notebooks – really ought to be enough. Used well, such systems are, of course, extremely useful as a complement to Anki. But for creative work and for problem-solving there is something special about having an internalized understanding. It enables speed in associative thought, an ability to rapidly try out many combinations of ideas, and to intuit patterns, in ways not possible if you need to keep laboriously looking up information. Source: Augmenting Long-term Memory

Focus on the stuff that truly matters

When you know the basics of something, you can start to dig into the parts that few people know about. This is where innovation happens.

When people respond to the mnemonic medium with “why do you focus on all that boring memory stuff?”, they are missing the point. By largely automating away the problem of memory, the mnemonic medium makes it easier for people to spend more time focusing on other parts of learning, such as conceptual issues. Source: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

How to write good flashcard questions

Only turn interesting questions into flashcards

Flashcards will help you remember things, so only remember what's worth it.

What you Ankify is not a trivial choice: Ankify things that serve your long-term goals. In some measure we become what we remember, so we must be careful what we remember. This is always true, but Anki makes it especially true. Source: Augmenting Long-term Memory

Ask one question per flashcard; create multiple flashcards per note if necessary

Atomic flashcards are easier to review.

You can focus on one idea, making it crystal clear where you stumble when you do.

Make most Anki questions and answers as atomic as possible: That is, both the question and answer express just one idea. ... When I made mistakes with the combined question, I was often a little fuzzy about where exactly my mistake was. That meant I didn't focus sharply enough on the mistake, and so didn't learn as much from my failure. When I fail with the atomic questions my mind knows exactly where to focus. Source: Augmenting Long-term Memory

Treat writing good flashcard questions as a skill, so practice and refine a lot

Whether you learn with flashcards or not all depends on how good your questions are.

[C]ards are fundamental building blocks of the mnemonic medium, and card-writing is better thought of as an open-ended skill. Do it poorly, and the mnemonic medium works poorly. Do it superbly well, and the mnemonic medium can work very well indeed. By developing the card-writing skill it’s possible to expand the possibilities of the medium. ... It turns out that answering the question “how to write good cards?” requires thinking hard about your theory of knowledge and how to represent it, and your theory of learning. The better those theories, the better your cards will be. Source: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?