As a software developer, you are constantly solving problems. Some problems can be solved with what you already know, while others require you to learn new information. Depending on where you are in your career, you might find yourself needing to constantly learn new information. With so much information to learn, wouldn’t it be great if you can speed up your learning?
In this post, I am going to talk about 7 ways you can speed up your learning.
1. Have a Realistic Goal
It’s okay to want to become a master of a framework or language, but that is not something that is realistic unless your goal will span for many years. In most cases, you’re learning in short burst because you need the information to do your tasks. So, your learning goal should be something along the line of “I want to learn X in order to do Y”. For example, you want to learn the basics of Swift to start developing an IOS app.
2. Define What Is Success
Tracking your progress is difficult when you don’t have a definition of success. Complete mastery of a subject is years of work and doesn’t show many results in a short time. If that is your metric to determine if you are successful, then you most likely have identified yourself as a failure.
Instead of defining success based on a far out goal, break it down into smaller goals. When you break your objective down into smaller parts, you’ll find them manageable and achievable. It might seem odd to do this even though you’re going for the same goal in the end. However, the journey towards the goal is different. If you have only one goal then you have many failures then one victory, while breaking the goal down gives you many small victories.
It is a shift in mindset, but when you are receiving positive results opposed to negative then you’re more likely to reach your goal. Take for example, if you want to develop a mobile app that can do X. In order to do X, you need to learn A, B, and C. If you see things as one goal then failing at A, B, or C would be considered a failure (unsuccessful) and succeeding in either A, B, or C by themselves will still be a failure. However, if you break things down and treat A, B, and C as individual goals toward X then succeeding in A, B, or C is being successful.
Notice that at the end of the day, both ways of working with A, B, and C is to reach X, but one has more positive reinforcement. And, well, I don’t know about you, but if I’m feeling happy, I am more likely to continue doing the work.
3. Embrace Failures
Failures are something that will happen if you decide to try something new. It is part of the learning process whether you like it or not. There is always negativity about failures and that is what keeps someone from trying to learn something new. Many are afraid of failures because they see it as a bad thing. However, failures can be a good thing too.
Whenever you fail, you learn something important and that is what doesn’t work. So, if you failed enough, you’ll find something that works. Remember that one time where you might have found a couple of different ways to do something, but only one of them actually worked? Imagine what would have happened if you gave up after trying just one way and it failed?
4. Multitasking Is Your Enemy
In our technology-filled world, it is very easy to become distracted from your learning. It is easy to get sidetracked by an email, text, or a direct message. Doing more than one thing at the same time might seem productive, but in most cases, it is actually harmful, you just don’t realize it.
Just like programming, learning is a high cognitive level task. That means it is best to learn while you are not distracted and focused on only that task. If you are having difficulty in focusing, I recommend you employ something like the Pomodoro technique and also check out my post about deep work.
5. Teach Others
Photo credit: Campaign Creators
Sharing your newly learned skills and knowledge is a great way to further solidify the new information in your brain. This is because, in order to teach others, you must be able to articulate the information into your own words. Not only that, but you also need to articulate it in various ways so others can understand. Unless you have a good grasp on the subject, you will not be able to explain it to others.
6. Apply What You Are Learning
Learning new things is great, but unless you are putting it to use, you’ll most likely forget most of it. So, if you are learning something, actually get hands-on with the information. Learning about the basics of a programming language? Bring up a code editor and code something applying the basics. Put your understanding to the test by putting it into practice.
This confirms whether you understand the information or not. If not, then now it probably leads you to have questions and cause you to actively seek out the solution. When you learn something because you need to, you’ll find out that you retained the information much more.
7. Align Your Learning with Your Learning Styles
Learning styles are an important factor in your learning rate. When your approach to learning doesn’t align with your learning styles, you retain much less information and end up wasting a lot of time and effort. However, when how you’re learning and your learning styles match up well, you’ll notice that the information comes easily to you. For details on learning styles and figuring out your own learning styles, check out my post about learning styles.
I hope this post was helpful to you. If you found this post helpful, share it with others so they can benefit too.
To get in touch, you can follow me on Twitter, leave a comment, or send me an email at steven@brightdevelopers.com.