Lots of people posted tips in the Google Helpouts Discuss community, but the tips were getting lost in the stream of messages. I decided to pull out the tips, rewrite them for clarity, and organize them by topic. I didn’t want to be the keeper of the document, though – no sense in my being a bottleneck! So I started a new document in Google Docs, fleshed it out, and shared the link.

To share a link that lets anyone with the link edit the document:

1. Click on File > Share…
2. Under Who has access, change the first line to Anyone who has the link can edit.
3. Copy the link.
4. Click Done.

That’s all well and good, but when it comes to publishing the document to the Web, you probably don’t want just anyone editing it. Here’s how to publish a separate read-only link:

1. Click on File > Publish to the web…
2. Publish the document
3. Copy the link.

Since Google URLs are long and unwieldy, you may want to come up with custom short URLs for both the edit link and the read-only link.

Hope that helps!

The growing popularity of Google Helpouts mean that I often respond to requests from people who want to learn more about taking notes and learning more effectively. I want to make sure that people who book Helpouts with me (for the virtual equivalent of hot chocolate and a muffin!) think about specific questions, check for technical issues, and are otherwise prepared for the 15-minute conversation. That way, we can both get the most of the time.

Since I find myself sending people messages that are similar but not identical to others I’ve sent, I use text expanders instead of autoresponders to save myself time. My favourite automation program is AutoHotkey, which is rather geekily configured through plain text files. (Want a cleaner interface? Try Lifehacker’s recommendations for Windows or Mac). I’ve defined a few hotstrings that expand to welcome messages for my different Helpouts, nudges about technical issues, and so on.

If you find yourself typing or copying and pasting a lot of text frequently, consider using a text expander. Typing a pre-defined shortcut is easier than finding a specific item in your snippets file, and you might even be able to do all sorts of other things with the tool. For example, I’ve used AutoHotkey to set a keyboard shortcut for copying something from a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet row, switching to another application, pasting it in, reformatting it, and then moving on to the next row. Lots of good stuff. See my Autohotkey blog posts for more examples.

Be lazy and automate! =)

It’s easy to look at a book instead of reading it. I’ve been there too: reading a textbook chapter without retaining enough information for an exam, reading self-improvement books without slowing down enough to think critically about the advice and plan how I’m going to use it. Fortunately, I remembered one of the acronyms that I picked up in those grade school lessons on how to read better. SQ3R: Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review.

Step 1: Survey. No, this doesn’t mean ask other people what they think of the book. Here, “survey” is like what a surveyor does to land – get an overview by looking at the structure. Look at the table of contents for a book, look at the headings, look at the first lines of paragraphs. This will give you a quick idea of what the section you’re reading will cover.

Step 2: Question. Before you dig into the book, think about the kinds of questions you should be able to answer after reading. If you’re preparing for an exam, think about the questions that would likely be there. If you’re reading for your own learning, think about your goals and how the book can help you. Write those questions down. Index cards are handy for review, because you can jumble them up and test yourself.

Step 3: Read. Now you read in more detail. As you read, write more questions. Write hints to help you answer them during your review, and make sure those hints are easy to hide or refer to when you’re reviewing. The backs of index cards work well, or you can use the Cornell method when taking notes.

Step 4: Recite. Answer your questions without referring to the text. You can answer the questions out loud or you can write the answers down for exam practice.

Step 5: Review. If you weren’t able to answer all of your questions confidently and correctly, go back and review the sections that need more work. Schedule some time the next day and in future review sessions to go over the questions again, without referring to your hints or to the text unless you need the reminder.

SQ3R – reading with questions in mind will help you get the most out of what you read. Good luck!

You might also like my notes on How to Read a Book (Adler and van Doren), my book workflow, and how I read books and do visual book reviews. Want to ask questions or share tips about learning? Comment below or check out http://sach.ac/learn for more resources.

I’ve been making little one-page guides to help people learn about topics. It turns out they’re fun to make. =) Click on the images for larger versions. Feel free to print out/share!

How can you get started with visual note-taking?

Getting started with mind-mapping

Getting started with bulk cooking

Getting started with Ledger

There’s this one about Emacs too, of course. =)

What else should I write/draw from a beginner’s point of view?  Comment and suggest!

Want to give it a try? Think about something you’ve learned, and draw a one-page beginner’s guide for it. (I’d love to see it!)

Intense learning can be exhausting. Here are some tips to manage your energy and make the most of a long day of lectures. Click on the images for larger versions!

Energy is the first part of the equation. If you’re not alert, you’ll have a harder time understanding and remembering important topics.

Full disclaimer: In university, I fell asleep in many of my classes because I hadn’t quite gotten the hang of these things. (Also, I had to sign up for a 7:30 AM class once. The topic was fun, dragging myself out of bed wasn’t.) Learn from my experience and manage your energy well. =)

Okay, now that you’re in the lecture, how can you deal with common challenges? Here are some ideas.

Review is where learning really happens. That’s when you fill in any gaps and connect what you’ve learned to what you need to remember and what you’ve learned before.

Hope these tips help!

I’d gotten spoiled by the way that Emacs can stash multiple clipboard items in its “kill ring” (kill being its idiosyncratic word for “cut”), so when I found myself juggling lots of text in the process of posting social media updates and publishing sketchnotes live during a fast-paced conference, I looked for a clipboard manager that could give me similar features in Microsoft Windows.

Clipboard managers turn out to be great time-savers for the easily distracted. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve copied something with the intent of pasting it into a different window – and then getting distracted by something else, copying that, and smacking my forehead in frustration because that overwrote my previous clipboard selection which I would have to re-fetch (if possible). A clipboard manager not only solves that problem, it even lets you use your clipboard in new ways. For example, do you need to link to a lot of pages? Copy all the URLs and titles, and then go through them pasting each one–or even export them straight from the clipboard manager.

I tried a lot of clipboard managers when I was in the thick of conference season. I imagined that I would use the clipboard manager not only for preparing social media updates but also for stashing some quick drawing elements. All the clipboard managers I tried worked well with text, but Clipmate worked the best for saving images. I ended up not using images as much as I thought I would (it was easier to just redraw things) and I’m using a fraction of the features in Clipmate, but I’m still glad I got used to using a clipboard manager.

If you’re curious about clipboard managers, you can check out Lifehacker’s recommendations for Windows clipboard managers, Macworld’s take on clipboard managers for Mac OS X, or these Linux links. They tend to run unobtrusively, so your usual copying/pasting will work the same way it always has – but you’ll have a backup in case you need it, and you can learn how to take advantage of that over time.

Hope that helps!

I’ve been trying to figure out how to improve my processes for reviewing my notes. Writing things down and drawing things (more often now!) are great ways to remember, but imagine if I could get even better at keeping track of current information and digging up things from my archive. My weekly, monthly, and yearly reviews have been really helpful even for just the decade I’ve kept them. I think they’ll be amazing to extend over a lifetime.

Come to think of it, my review needs probably fall into these categories:

• A. Open loops: I need to be able to review my notes for things I’m working on, especially if they go beyond a few pages or what my memory can hold. I can make this easier by keeping an index or map of things I’m currently thinking about so that important topics don’t fall through the cracks.
• B. Growth / review: I like reviewing how far I’ve come, checking that against my plans and thinking about what I want to do next. Progress is hard to see day by day, so records help.
• C. Topics I’m thinking about in depth, especially over time: I can simplify review by organizing things into larger and larger chunks, like the way that writing subroutines makes programs easier to understand and remember.
• D. Archived information: Book notes, experiences, topics I’m not actively thinking about, and so on. I don’t refer to these regularly, although I occasionally need to dig them up. It’s great if these are publicly viewable and searchable, because then other people can look up stuff without being limited by what I remember. (Don’t ask me for book recommendations when I’m walking around; blog comments and e-mails are better channels because I can refer to my notes.)

In particular, I’m working on getting better at thinking about topics that are beyond what I can hold in my head (C). Combining mind-mapping with sketches looks like a promising approach, and making summary sketches/blog posts can help me chunk things better too.

I also want to get better at tracking decisions so that I can review them 9-12 months later (or at a suitable review date), which is one of the tips from Peter Drucker’s Managing Oneself (see my sketchnote). I’ve posted decision reviews before, but it would be good to make the process more reliable. Making decision analysis part of my daily drawing practice will help with documenting larger decisions, and then I can use Evernote or Org reminders to schedule the review.

Reviewing what I’ve been learning can also help me see what I want to learn more about next. If I can keep my main topics in mind and focus on exploring subtopics that are near those, then I can take notes that are more useful for myself and other people. It’s different from a scattershot approach because it lets me build up more competency or understanding in different areas, and it’s different from a tightly focused approach because this way I don’t overspecialize or get bored, and I can play with the connections between ideas.

Most of the note-taking tips out there focus on school, of course. I wasn’t sure how useful those tips would be once you’re done with exams and final projects, but they might be handy after all. It’s easy to convince yourself that you know enough about something, but the real test is using that knowledge to do something new or become someone different. How will learning something change me? What will I be able to do?

In addition to learning something from the way school structures reviews, maybe I can learn from people who have kept journals for decades, and authors who do extensive research (maybe nonfiction books in the same area?). I’d love to learn more about how prolific note-takers organize and review their information. I’m not interested in perfect memory or people for whom this is easy. I’d love to learn from people who have thought about it, tried different things, and found ways that worked better for them. Thoughts?