POLY BLOG

So I have been grappling with these 2 ideas recently.

The first idea comes from this book "How To Read A Book" by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren.

"The most important thing to remember about any practical book is that it can never solve the practical problems with which it is concerned. ... [A] practical problem can only be solved by action itself."

The second idea comes from this Ted(x) Talk from this guy Josh Kaufman, "The first 20 hours -- how to learn anything"

This is one of those talks that serve as an introduction to a broad idea that the speaker wrote a book about. You hear the broad strokes and if you like them, you give the book a shot.

The talk was alright as a piece of entertainment and motivational material. I would recommend watching if you are curious about Kaufmans specific method but I would like to simplify it to a simple sentence.

"If you practice something for 20 hours you will be better at it."

The throughline of these 2 ideas is simple. The only way to get better at something is to do it a lot.

The following is a collection of thoughts from thinking about these ideas as well as some others loosely connected by the idea of a "hobby log". I hope you enjoy.

What is a hobby log?

A hobby log (perhaps a "hlog") is my idea for how to track practice over time.

It is a document that aims to track how long someone has practiced at something by logging sessions.

Any activity can be logged from studying for a specific subject to exercise. I wreckoned with calling it a "practice log" but hobby log sounded better to me.

Here is an idea of what one might look like:

Using the hobby log we can track how much time we have spent on any given topic/task.

This data gives us the power to test the 20 hour claim.

Habits, Skill Acquisition, Repetition and You!

One of the most important misconceptions about habit formation is about time versus repetition.

The amount of time spent is less important then the amount of repetitions.

Habits form because once the brain runs into a problem enough times it will employ the solution automatically to conserve energy.

Have you ever played a game for 10 hours straight and woke up the next day to see your performance isn't as good as you thought it would be? The brain may run into multiple instances of a problem in one session but because its only been one session it assumes it only needs to do it onceit can begin to forget.

In session 2 you will be better than session 1 but your brain will have trouble remembering past a certain mark (my guess is around the 2 hour mark but I can't be sure)

So maybe you'll be pretty good after 20 hours but you're better off splitting those 20 hours into multiple shorter sessions than try to do 2 days of 10 hour sprints.

Tracking: Boon Or Bullshit?

Here's the make or break question each system must come to eventually:

"Is the overhead of maintaining this worth what I am getting out of it?"

This goes for all sorts of things but for now lets put it in the context of the hobby log.

Minimise! Your! Overhead!

You have to make adding entries into the hobby log as effortless as possible if you want to do it.

If someone puts their hobby log on their computer that takes 5 minutes to boot and may have an automatic update guess what happens to your motivation?

It will go with the wind my friend.

Personally I'm going to experiment with an A5 journal.

Having a dedicated book for something like this is useful. If you just use one notebook for everything (journaling, shopping lists, essays, hobby log) you will be forced to backtrack to continue adding items to your log or skip it and waste precious space.

One notebook to act as your hobby log lets you append whenever. You could even have a weekly report or something at the end.

If you can afford the buffer between motivation and tracking you can consider using a spreadsheet. I think it would be more reliable to track on paper and then add to a spreadsheet after a week or so.

The Hobby Log and The 20 Hour Rule

I am someone who is interested in many different topics. Too many topics.

The appeal of the 20 hour rule is that it gives a benchmark for how much time should be spent learning something before you decide to pursue it further.

You can decide "I am just going to give this thing 20 hours." and after those 20 hours you can decide whether or not its worth pursuing further.

It is much better then being in deadlock from the overwhelming amount of choices there are.

Theres this idea that ADHD makes someone more prone to distraction. I once heard a positive spin on this that says ADHD makes someone more prone to inspiration which I like more but the result is often the same.

At the end of the day, the 20 hour rule solves the ambiguity of "How long should I spend learning something?" and ideally gets you to simply start practicing.