Ask HN:How do track your daily learning progress? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN:How do track your daily learning progress?

4 pointssharmi6 comments

Hi, I'm taking a break from work for a few months. I would like to utilize the time effectively to learn about an unfamiliar branch of computing and try applying it to interesting problems. So it is part learning and part applying.

But I'm afraid I might lose track or balance and not achieve as much as I would like to. I believe tracking my activities daily would help. I should also be able to share it with my accountability buddy.

It would be nice to also be able to map my daily activities to the overall plan to visualize how much progress has been made.

Have you faced a similar situation? How did you handle it? Was there any particular tool that was useful for you? It would be great if you can share your experiences.

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I currently use http://lift.do/ (it's an iPhone app) to keep track of what I do and to see my progress. I can also see what my friends are doing and prop them. And they can see what I'm doing and prop me. Every day, I receive an email showing me my progress.

Hi Ninthfrank, It seems to be an interesting app. Unfortunately I don't have an iPhone. :(

I also use http://rescuetime.com. It might be helpful to you if you just want to track what you do on your computer. It's just an app you install on your PC or Mac and it runs in the background. And then you can go on their website to see where exactly you spend your time and how productive you are.

Hi ninthfrank, Thanks for the suggestion. I did use rescuetime. It gives interesting stats. Since I spend a lot of time on coursera videos playing in vlc, it decided i was wasting a lot of time ;) It was very useful nonetheless. Unfortunately it stopped working when I changed my desktop environment. I will go back and get it working again.

I'm just using a spreadsheet via Google Docs. On one tab, I have broad areas that I want to learn. After that I break that down into weekly milestones based on the book / learning material. This includes projects or specific assignments I'm supposed to accomplish. Once I have the roadmap created, I then follow the pomodoro technique. The pomodoro technique is quite handy to monitor my productivity on a regular basis.

Hi Khetarpai, Thank you, that is the closest that we could get to managing learning tasks I think.

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