Improving everyday

Running away from distractions

There are way too many distractions nowadays. Plethora of content available on Netflix, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon Prime, YouTube and loads of other sources to view. However, most of it does not help with progressing in your daily lives. It does not help with your work, does not add to the knowledge but still takes away a lot of time! I don’t Facebook anymore so that’s quite some time saved but nonetheless there are multiple other sources of useless entertainment and if I had to guess more than 95% of the content is something you are better off without viewing.

I’ve been thinking of how to deal with this situation and while around looking for some hints, I stumbled across this amazing video today on the 5 hour rule.

I think this video is definitely in the useful 5% bucket. :)

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Below is what I’ve learnt from the process and tried to add something to it.

1. Plan out the learning.
2. Set time aside just for learning. Ideally 60 mins.
3. Practice what you’ve been learning.
4. Ruminate everyday. Think over the topic with an independent mind. Ideally 30 mins.
5. Solve problems as they arise. Don’t procrastinate. Take the bull by the horns and ride with it.
6. Once a week, reflect on what you’ve been learning and how would you change the process. Remember, just like learning is a never-ending process, so is learning how to learn.

Where to go from here

It is sad that I’m doing this more than 2 months into the year, but the top 5 items on my plan for this year is to:

1. Read through and practice problems from Andrew Trask’s book, Grokking Deep Learning.
2. Learn a Deep Learning framework. There are two new tensorflow courses which would be ideal. Pick one of the two.

Intro to TensorFlow for Deep Learning | Udacity

TensorFlow: From Basics to Mastery - deeplearning.ai

3. Write what I learn.

Writing what you learn really reinforces the idea into the mind. Easy to say and hard to follow but hopefully will stick to this.

4. Read at least one good book on management principles. I’d like to get better at managing time and project. Most importantly try to put this in to practice.

5. Join a gym and spend at least 3 hours every week working out.

I’ll add a reminder to visit this post every week to keep reminding myself of the desire to improve.

There it is. My first medium post!