Logging learning

It can be really easy to deceive yourself about how much time you are spending on your learning unless you track it since our memories are notoriously unreliable. We can remember doing something a few days ago when in fact it was a few weeks ago.

So if you genuinely want to make progress then it can be a good idea to maintain a learning log.

In this log (which can just be a simple notebook), you can record:

• the duration and frequency of your learning sessions and what they covered
• what you have mastered, what confuses you, what questions you would like answered
• if you are learning from a book, the pages you read, the exercises you worked through
• the things you are finding hard that you might want to spend more time on
• a rating of how you felt the session went, along with the time and date
• whether the gaps between learning sessions are causing you to spend too much time re-learning material already covered in earlier sessions. 

A learning log can help you become more mindful of what might otherwise remain below the threshold of your awareness. And once you are mindful of something, you can do something about it.

Once you have been keeping a learning log for a while, you may begin to see patterns in your activity, the days and times when you seem to learn best. Or the times best for learning versus the times best for active practice or doing exercises. In this way your learning log can become, not just a record, but a tool for refining your learning process.

And one more powerful thing your log can do is act as a source of encouragement and motivation. So often we are tempted to measure our progress in relation to our ultimate goal, which can seem discouragingly far away. But far more motivating is to see how far you've come, to look back and see how things you once found difficult and confusing have now become clear and easy.

And this gives you the confidence to persist with your learning because if you've achieved this once, you have every reason to believe you can achieve it again.