"Pragmatic Thinking & Learning: Refactor Your Wetware"Author:
Andy Hunt"Pragmatic Thinking & Learning" is a veritable goldmine of useful information if it's your goal to optimize your learning capabilities. This volume includes the following tips which I've found particularly useful:
- The morning pages technique
- Creating a "Pragmatic Investment Plan" (PIP)
- Mind maps for collaborative brainstorming
- Creating a Personal Wiki
- Avoiding Context Switching
Morning Papers:Writing
morning papers is the practice of getting up in the morning, every morning, and before you have your coffee or even have time to shake off the grogginess, you write 3 pages, long hand in a notebook. It sounds a bit dull and time-consuming, I know, but it can lead to some really great insights.
The purpose for doing this is that this is basically an "unguarded brain dump." First thing in the morning you're not completely awake and are still operating partially within the subconscious portion of your brain. This way you get a fairly direct link to the most creative side of your mind (referred to as R-mode in this book). Just try it out and you might be pleased with the results. I know I've been.
The rules for this practice are as follows:
- Write your morning pages first thing in the morning--before your coffee, before the traffic report, before talking to Mr. Showerhead, before packing the kids off to school or letting the dog out.
- Write at least three pages, long hand. No typing, no computer.
- Do not censor out what you write. Whether it's brilliant or banal, just let it out.
- Do not skip a day.
Your
pragmatic investment plan (PIP) is essentially a
portfolio of knowledge and skills that you
currently possess and the
level at which you can execute the use of said skills plus those
skills and bodies of knowledge you'd like to seek in the future. The purpose of this is to track the expenditure of your time on skill building and honing and to allot more or less time to each individual item.
"Just having a plan is an incredibly effective step toward achieving any goal. Too often, most of us slip into a kind of default learning schedule: you might take some time to learn a new language when you have a free moment or to look at the new library in your spare time. Unfortunately, relegating learning activities to your 'free time' is a recipe for failure." (Pg. 154)
Free time is like closet space or disk drive space: it always gets filled with one thing or another. You need a solid plan of action if you're serious about learning this new trick you're after.
For more on PIP check out
this post on
Brian Mavity's blog.
Mind Maps:Mind maps when used for
collaborative brainstorming can be a great learning/teaching device because it enables a high level of interaction amongst your team.
If you create a "safe zone" in which your team members aren't rebuked for pitching an idea that isn't the most brilliant or practical, you can get a really great flow of information set up which will lead to more well thought-out projects and products. This will allow for you to get your whole team involved in the development process without anybody feeling constrained.
The great thing about mind maps are that they visually represent the flow of information and each node is a branch off of a another so the information can be understood via visualization and re-factored by all those involved whether technical or not; therefore not excluding any in your team.
Of course mind maps aren't exclusively suited simply for collaboration but they're also a great development tool that can help you outline a problem or solution and devise an attack plan by being able to visualize the entire structure of the problem. It's a really wonderful device.
Some great software to use for mind map creation on your Windows/Linux/OSX machine is
FreeMind which is a
free/OSS mind map creation software that is fairly simple to use. There are also proprietary implementations which will cost you such as
ConceptDraw PRO MINDMAP and
MS Office Visio. Both of these are great tools and capable of much more than just mind mapping but I like to keep it simple when I'm creating mind maps and, frankly, like to stick to paper for the first draft anyhow (post-it notes on a whiteboard are also a great technique for collaboration: allows for quick re-factoring of ideas). The software should only be for the formalization of a mind map if this is ever necessary.
Personal Wiki:Creating a
personal wiki may be one of the single most important things I took from reading this book. This is one of those things that, when it's revealed to you, makes you think "wow, why didn't I think of this before?"
This is great storage method for information that's relevant to your everyday life kept on an external device that isn't your brain. The wiki serves as an "exocortex" or external storage device which is best suited for keeping large amounts of information in order that your brain doesn't slow down. You need to do this to augment your brain's processing capabilities to the maximum level.
If you keep storing more and more things on your brain all the time, clutter amongst your thoughts accumulate and you're not as quick or decisive in your thoughts or actions. Also, you're unable to keep focused because there are always other things you feel you must be attending to as you're trying to focus, unsuccessfully, on the task at hand.
The wiki is great tool because it allows you to put all the information into one place in a structured and hyper-linked format. It's sort of along the same lines as a mind map in the way it organizes data except that it's not in a visualized format but a text one.
Your wiki is a great place to store all the ideas that accumulate over time in your "thought bucket" (such as a
Moleskine notebook you keep for ideas) in a more hardened and structured manner.
"This is not some mere clerical activity. According to the research into distributed cognition, the tolls you use for mental support outside your brain become part of your operating mind. As marvelous as the brain is, we can turbo-charge it by providing some key external support." (Pg. 220)
Of course, now you need the software to enable the creation of this magical device. The typical
MediaWiki wiki software (which is the backbone of wikipedia.com) can be found
here and is free/OSS. This is not, however what I would recommend the average user use to develop his/her wiki as it is rather complicated to setup unless you're technically inclined (know how to setup an Apache server on your system and enable PHP support with a MySQL backend for data storage).
The software that I use for keeping a wiki is
Microsoft Office OneNote. It's not the primary purpose of this software I suppose but it does everything I need it to do. It will link files together and allows you to organized everything in a hierarchically structured way which is paramount in keeping data organized properly.
Context Switching:"You can't pay attention to too many different things at once, because to change your focus from one item to another means you have to switch context. And unfortunately, our brains just aren't wired to support context switching very well."
The problem today is that there are just too many things to pay attention to. There are far too many distraction (thanks, Internet...) and we can't manage it very well if we don't have a well-established system for doing so.
Setting up a system for organizing and processing tasks efficiently is key to managing context switching. This streamlining of your daily workflow would be most effective if modeled after David Allen's
"Getting Thing's Done" routine which entails:
- Scan the input queue only once: Whatever input queue you are dealing with, be it in an email inbox, voicemail, or paper inbox, don't use the arrival box as a storage device. go through and sort the new arrivals into whatever piles are necessary, but don't keep rescanning the same old stuff in the input queue. If it's something that can be dispatched in less than two minutes, then do it and get it over with, or pawn it off on someone else entirely if you can (aka delegation). Constantly reviewing the same 1,000 inbox messages to work on the last 20 important ones just wastes your time and mental energy.
- Process each pile of work in order: Once you have your piles, work them. Stay on taskand avoid context switching. As we saw earlier, switching to another task will blow your mental stack and you'll lose more time as you get back into the task. We programmer types are highly susceptible to being distracted by shiny things. Stick to your pile.
- Don't keep lists in your head: Allen spots another important aspect of maintaining and exocortex. Dynamic refresh of mental lists is very expensive. Instead, keep to to-do lists and such somewhere in your exocortex--on a sticky note, in a wiki, in a calendaring or dedicated to-do list tool, or in something similar.
I know this was a long post and if you're reading this that's because you either liked it or just have some compulsive problem where you need finish whatever you start (or you skipped to the very end). In any case, I applaud your valiant effort.
Thanks for reading!
Ok, look, nobody cares what OS it is that you prefer. Be it Windows because that's all you've ever had the pleasure of using or OS X if you've become an enlightened member of society (or so you peddle off on others). Maybe you like Linux because it's a great OS for developing and extremely stable. The thing is, all of these operating systems have their place which is why they're still around and being developed on.
