Keeping track of what I’m learning

In 2018 I decided to be more intentional about keeping track of what I’m learning, I devoted about 30–45mins every month to write down the books, articles, online courses, podcasts and videos I came across that were most interesting or helpful in the month. I did this for 12 months and even wrote about it, Since then I’ve been getting a lot of feedback and Bolu Akindele made me realise that I had to do a follow-up post.

How do I get time to learn that much?

Well, I’ve been learning like this for the past 10 years so it’s kinda normal, however, it’d be dishonest to say I don’t put effort and structure around my learning. I have a threshold for the number of books I expect to read in a month — 2, most times I surpass this but it helps me measure how much I’m learning. In the past, I used to do say read 10 pages or 1 one chapter per day, anything to measure my progress.

I listen to podcasts when I’m walking or doing some activity. I read mostly in the evenings and on weekends, I can actually just stay indoors all weekend. I also read when I’m in transit — if you live in Lagos you can relate to how traffic can make you spend more time on the road than expected.

I do most of the learning activities on my phone — reading, podcasts, online courses, videos so it’s very handy. I use my laptop but then my phone is my default learning device. I learn from different sources because I’m comfortable with them and I believe knowledge is fairly distributed.

Most of my learnings are on writing, design, human behaviour, faith, finance, tech or any other random topic I happen to be interested in during the month

Online courses

So far I’ve taken my Courses from Coursera, Udemy & Skillshare.

Organised knowledge is a good way to learn. There’s a lot of information online but it’s often scattered, sometimes it’s worth paying for someone who has taken time to put together this information to save me the stress of looking for different pieces of information online.

Books

It really depends on my interest, I read mostly non-fiction books for now but I’m looking to add more fiction books to my library, I’m always looking to add more variety, I don’t want to be stuck in a bubble.

Articles

Some of my faves are Medium, Havard Business Review, Stears, Quartz, Mckinsey Insights, Desiring God, Stratechery, Quora (I don’t know if this fits but I couldn’t think of any better category), Andrew Chen, Techcrunch, Techpoint , Know your team and many more.

Not every time books, sometimes shorter pieces of content. I visit these sites

Videos

The futur, The school of life, Vox, L2inc, TED, Siraj Raval, Tech Altar, Desiring God, Ravi Zacharis, Cold Fusion.

Somethings are better learnt visually. I love my youtube feed, it just keeps sucking me in 😭

Podcast

A16z, HBR, Masters Of Scale

I’m still picking up on this, there’s too much content and I think podcasts are a once in a while thing for now.

Newsletters

There are very few things better than having content come directly to your inbox. I’m ramping up my newsletter subscriptions. Here are a couple of my faves: Morning Brew — I look forward to reading this every day, I wish there was something like this for Nigeria/Africa, I’d definitely subscribe.

Others are Andrew Chen, Stears, Nir and Far, Adam Grant, Tech crunch weekly, Product hunt & Know your team

While learning a lot is exciting…

I’m also learning to slow down, to take time to reflect on what I’ve learnt, to practise what I’ve learnt, to revisit previous stuff learnt, observe what’s happening around me, to put on some wait!

I’m most proud of the fact that I can learn from different sources, knowledge is becoming fairly distributed amongst different platform.

What Next? A better way to share 🙂

So I thought about how people wait till the end of the year to share their best books or reads, I think that’s cool, however, If everyone did that wouldn’t that be too overwhelming + it means we’d have to wait till the end of the year to learn something that could have helped us earlier. I’m most grateful to people who regularly share what they are learning, these people help me learn better and inspire me to keep sharing what I’m learning. I’d be sharing a streamlined version of the most helpful/interesting things I come across every month in a monthly newsletter. I hope you subscribe and let me know what you think about it.

I don’t have it figured out but hey I’d give it a shot.

One newsletter every month.

You can subscribe here