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Jannik Weichert
Managing Director
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Learning is a crucial skill that can help you achieve success in many areas of life. Whether you're trying to get ahead professionally or simply acquire new knowledge and skills, effective learning is essential. To be efficient, there are several steps you can take to learn more effectively and set yourself up for success. By following the learning steps outlined in this article, you can improve your ability to learn and retain new information faster.
How can we make sure we're learning the right things? How can we learn more effectively? In other words, how do we make sure we cover the right topics and skills. Learn in the right order? What to start with? Leave out what?
Here is the answer: We must learn to deconstruct and isolate skills.
What is meant by this? Put simply, a skill consists of a large number of smaller skills, we call them atomic skills, many of which are interconnected and interdependent. Many skills can therefore only be mastered if the atomic skills necessary for understanding have been mastered beforehand.
We know this problem from math lessons, for example: Math topics build on each other very much, and if you ignore them, you get “stuck” very quickly. This problem also exists in many other subjects - whenever skills build on each other and cannot be learned in isolation.
Depending on the skill, however, atomic skills also often have different effects on the “mastery” of a skill. Sports greats like Kobe Bryant have been preaching “don't sweat the easy things” for ages - because it has been proven that mastering and ultimately perfecting the basics is often the biggest lever for actually mastering a skill.
Atomic skills, which must be used particularly frequently in daily work, must be perfected.
What the simple passing game and fitness are in soccer can be the statistical basics and programming skills in Python in the area of machine learning. Too often we see learners who despair in the learning process because they deal too quickly with advanced concepts, whose basics are not mastered or who, although exciting to learn, are not among the most important atomic skills.
This is exactly why we at edyoucated focus extremely on the process of “deconstructing a skill” for learners when it comes to personalizing our learning paths. We deconstruct skills and determine the ideal sequence of atomic skills to be learned. Our experts will quickly find the appropriate materials to learn these skills. In other words, we design the optimal learning path so that every learner can learn the right skills in the right order.
Actual learning. Sit down, start, pull through, done. So easy, so good. The reality is often completely different. We humans are absolute masters at doing exactly the opposite. We let ourselves be distracted and give priority to other things in the short term.
When we're unable to actually learn, it's often due to one of two different reasons:
To actually learn, we need to be able to minimize procrastination and distraction. But before we dive into specific techniques that are suitable for this purpose, it's useful to take a step back and consider why we're so good at procrastinating and distracting ourselves in the first place.
In the end, there are many reasons for this. One of the most important: Learning is a process with delayed reward (-> “delayed gratification”). Similar to many people who exercise or eat healthily.
Delayed reward” is a psychological term and simply means that a reward for behavior is not immediate but only later. Learning is often complicated at first, and many things are not immediately understandable. Learning is difficult right now, and we often have to repeat things to really solidify. This is compounded by the fact that the advantage of what has been learned often does not occur immediately, but only after several learned atomic skills have been combined.
The same goes for going to the gym, by the way. If we put ourselves in front of the mirror before and after training, we won't notice any big changes. The positive effects will only be visible in the future and if implemented regularly. For us humans, this is a big problem because we have to find a lot of motivation to do these things anyway. To make matters worse, we unfortunately encounter many things in everyday life that trigger a direct reward in the brain rather than delayed: things like a smartphone, chocolate or the evening series on the couch.
But other activities also have similar effects on us, giving us a “sense of urgency.” When a deadline is approaching or when things get stressful, the first things we drop are almost always the ones that cause a reward deferral.
But what can we do about it? How can we ensure that we actually start learning?
We must prevent procrastination. There are various techniques for this, and each of us must find for ourselves which works best. In the following, we would like to give you 6 techniques present us with whom we have had good experiences:
To be sure you get started, study for at least 2 minutes. For example, you often have no motivation, or you don't have enough time to study a whole hour and want to postpone learning again. But if you set aside at least 2 minutes, you no longer have a mental excuse to put off studying. Everyone has 2 minutes, no matter how busy they are. Often, the original 2 minutes become a larger investment of time as soon as you have successfully overcome the first hurdle of getting started.
The easier we make it to start learning, the sooner we'll start. This means: Place learning equipment within easy reach. Would you like to spend more time on a specific non-fiction book? Place it right on your desk where you can see it every day. Are you sure you want to finish the online course? Set it as your browser's start page. The harder it is to start studying, the more likely you'll put it off. By the way, the same concept also works great to avoid negative activities. Would you like to spend less time in front of the Playstation? Instead of placing the controller on the living room table, you should remove the console and place it in the closet.
When we make a promise to someone that we will do something, the likelihood that we will actually do it increases dramatically. For example, you can find a study group or tell a friend that you want to achieve a specific learning goal at a specific time. Just the announcement of such a goal will have an impact.
For many people, however, the problem may not be the only or most serious problem at first. Everyone probably knows the feeling when you were seemingly “busy” all day but somehow didn't achieve as much as you had set out to do in the end. The most common reason for that? We let ourselves be distracted during actual work.
What tips & tricks are there to minimize distractions while studying? Here, too, we would like to tell you three techniques with which we have achieved very good results.
The simplest and probably most effective trick is to minimize distractions from outside factors. However, potential distractions appear in many places — our smartphone flashes, a call comes in, our colleague needs something from us, or our children want to play with us in the home office. In many places, we can't eliminate these distractions due to work — especially when “ad hoc support” is part of our job (as an IT administrator or sales expert, for example). However, we should try to limit distractions as much as possible. Possible examples:
In addition to minimizing visual distractions, reducing noise is one of the most important factors for minimizing distraction. If your work environment allows you to work undisturbed for a period of time, wearing headphones (preferably with active noise canceling technology) or good old earplugs will help you study and concentrate. At edyoucated, for example, we've introduced a policy that says we won't disturb anyone wearing headphones because they could be in their concentrated period of learning or working — unless it's extremely important. The headphones serve as a clear sign of concentrated work and a request not to be distracted.
Unfortunately, it is often the case that we are not distracted. For many of us, it's simply impossible to completely switch off from distractions because we need to answer phone calls or have young children at home who want to be busy. We've found that regular meditation and using concentration music can help us drastically reduce the time we need after distractions. In other words, we learn to focus again and learn faster after we've been distracted. There are now a number of very good programs for meditation — our team's favorites: Headspace, Calm, and Waking Up.
So if you manage to learn regularly and learn the right things, you'll achieve the third area of learning optimization: increasing learning effectiveness. What do we understand by this? It is about the question of how we can maximize output — i.e. learning success — per invested learning time. Remember: Learning success is a very general term and means very different things in different areas, depending on the objectives (understanding concepts, implementing projects, or memorizing vocabulary). Put simply, how can we learn, retain, and apply more in less time?
Here, too, there are a number of techniques that can help us as learners. Three general techniques that can be applied to almost all complex learning topics are briefly presented below:
This technique dates back to the well-known physicist and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman and describes a process for better understanding new topics.
Describe what you've learned as if you were explaining it to a child. Write the concept or problem you want to understand at the very top of a piece of paper. Then explain the ideas directly below as you would explain them to another person. Use illustrative examples, analogies, and visualizations. Describing an idea from start to finish in simple language that a child can understand forces you to understand the concept on a deeper level. You will find that in some places it is particularly difficult to get along without specialized vocabulary, or that there are basic comprehension problems. That's where the gaps in our understanding lie — and that's where step 2 comes in.
Review the unclear topic. Now that you know where there are still gaps in your comprehension, go back to the subject matter and work through it again until you can explain it in simple terms. Because only if you can explain without technical terms and in simple words will you really understand the topic. If you omit this step, you often have the problem of believing that you have understood something when that is not the case. This is the so-called “illusion of knowledge.” The term dates back to communication scientist Elisabeth Nölle-Neumann from 1986 and describes the subjective assessment of knowing more than you know objectively.
Explain it to another person who has little understanding of the subject. If you manage to get that person to understand the content of the topic, that's a very good sign that you've really understood what you've learned. If you still find that there is ambiguity in some areas, go back to step 2.
With the active recall concept, information is retrieved from memory by testing yourself at every stage of the learning process. By actively retrieving information from our brain, our ability to retain information is drastically improved. An active feedback mechanism is created that gives us as learners feedback as to whether we have actually understood or retained something. By actively testing ourselves, we ensure that we don't fall into the “illusion of knowledge” and believe we've understood something even though we haven't.
There are various ways to use Active Recall. For example, if you learn a lot with nonfiction, it may help to briefly close the book and ask yourself at the end of a chapter what you've learned from the last few pages. All too often, that's not very much (and unfortunately not the fault of the book's content). If you learn with online courses, a method based on “Cornell note-taking” has proven effective. With this adapted technique, you think of questions during the learning process that you would expect in a hypothetical quiz, but do not write down the answers explicitly, but write down the corresponding places in the respective learning material. This allows you to continue testing yourself even after the learning videos have ended and, in case of doubt, know where to find more information about the learning content. Important: Resist the urge to ask questions about everything! Instead, focus on key concepts, ideas, and content and not on unimportant details.
You might be wondering why we don't recommend writing down the answers to the questions directly? In our experience, this can slow down the process of editing the learning videos too much and does not benefit learning effectiveness.
Finally, our “secret tip” when it comes to transferring what you have learned into long-term memory. As the name suggests, “spaced learning” is about looking at the topics to be learned again and again at specific intervals over a certain period of time and actively checking whether what you have learned is still actively available. This technique is of course particularly suitable for fact-based learning (e.g. vocabulary learning), but is also very helpful for long-term understanding of concepts and ideas. The background to this system is the “curve of forgetting,” which states that the less we have repeated the content, the more of what we have learned is forgotten over time. Conversely, this also means that content that is learned over a longer period of time is better remembered than content that is intensively repeated in a short period of time. As part of spaced learning, it is therefore important to comply with certain intervals between repetition processes, which become longer over time.
If you successfully follow these three learning tips and use the techniques presented in this blog, we are very confident that you will see a drastic increase in your learning efficiency. As you embark on the journey to learn how to learn, you might be interested in applying these skills in a corporate setting. Corporate e-learning 101 is an e-book that dives into the world of professional development and provides practical advice on how to learn and grow effectively in a company. From understanding the importance of continuous learning to implementing effective learning strategies, this e-book contains lots of valuable information that can help you succeed in the corporate world. So why wait? Start your learning journey today and find out in our guide 10 steps to get started with e-learning.
edyoucated is funded by leading research institutions such as the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB), Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK).
