I have some obsessive tendency to accumulate info/resources for learning (talks, presentations, blog post, books, podcast, etc).
From time to time I need to carry out an exercise to identify the things that I want to learn to complement my actual skills... This exercise helps me to narrow (temporarily) my scope for learning and gain speed, focus and motivation.
The process:
- I bring together a lot of topics that I am interested in (from languages, and technologies, to soft skills, and cultural topics).
- I classify each topic in several levels (my interest, my actual experience, level of alignment with my personal path/mission, etc.).
- I try to discard as many topics as possible... for example because I am already proficient or good enough. In these cases, I'd like to learn more, but I will not make any special effort.
- I select three or four topics.
- I remove mercilessly unrelated items from my list of resources (books, talks, blog posts, articles, etc...). It is important to remove as much as possible because we don't have enough energy and if something is really important it will reappear in the future... :)
The results:
- Learning Javascript (the language). I will try to improve my Javascript knowledge up to a basic knowledge. Focused on the language itself and the most common execution environment (node and browser).
- Serverless. I see the serverless based architectures as the next step for a PaaS that force us to think in terms of events and create cloud-native designs. I think that this technology will be very important in the near future.
- Advanced AWS usage. In this case, I decided that even if I learned a lot about cloud technologies in my actual job I need to go deeper in AWS to really understand and gain more confidence.
- Frontend minimal stuff. I have developed from Linux kernel drivers up to cloud-native applications, but only a few times I needed to develop customer-facing apps (or at least in the actual frontend apps sense)... So my idea in this regard is to have the minimal experience with HTML5, CSS and the minimal amount of javascript needed to implement small SPAs.
I also take other actions to remove inputs for distraction:
- Unfollow a lot of people on twitter (sorry, not enough time...).
- Remove sync for email on my mobile.
- And remove a lot of apps that generate push notifications.
This process also helps a lot with my impostor syndrome :)
And remember, when you buy a book, you don't buy the time to read it
Related content:
- learning how to learn (coursera course)
- Consumo de contenidos y aprendizaje deliberado (spanish)