Resources to become a better learner

Questions & Help Queries
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Before we get started learning everything about Logseq queries, I thought I’d first share how to tackle personal learning projects like this.

Because of my job (and my curiosity), I’ve had to learn many topics quickly. If you’re a programmer or work in any unstructured domain, constant learning will be part of your day-to-day as well. If that’s the case, it’s less likely you’ll need my help (although you may pick up a technique or two). But for people who aren’t used to constant learning, I think my frameworks will come in handy.

Below you’ll find three recordings of talks that I gave earlier. I’ve also added the outline of each talk. I hope these will be useful and help you properly plan the weeks ahead.

Please share your own notes, frameworks, and templates for learning below!

The power of keeping a learn log

Go to the Community Hub for the session outline.

Deconstructing the meta-skill of learning how to learn

4:15 Why become better at learning?

  • If you’re a knowledge worker, you’re likely to face information overwhelm.
  • Most skills are now digital, and technology moves fast.
  • Using new technology, you can automate much of what you do repeatedly.
  • When you know how to learn, you’ll have more fun—even when the going gets tough.

7:10 Why deconstruct the skill of learning how to learn?

  • Knowing how to learn is a skill in itself.
  • The learning process leans on subskills like note-taking, reviewing knowledge, memorization, and deliberate practice—among others.
  • As many courses are lacking, you need to take ownership over your learning process.

9:21 How to deconstruct a skill

  • Deconstruction — What are the minimal learnable units, the LEGO blocks, I should start with?
  • Selection — Which 20% of the blocks should I focus on for 80% or more of the outcome I want?
  • Sequencing — In what order should I learn the blocks?
  • Stakes — How do I set up stakes to create real consequences and guarantee I follow the program?

20:24 The subskills of learning how to learn

  • 21:22 Defining desired outcomes

    • Understanding
      • For everything we do, we should have a clear goal in mind: an understanding of problems and being able to solve them.
      • Only when you understand what problem you’re trying to solve can you become an effective learner.
      • Before you can master a skill, you need to know how to perform the individual steps.
    • Solve problems
      • Being a knowledge worker means that you consume information to solve business problems.
      • As businesses become more complex, you encounter problems for the first time.
      • Even when you know how to solve a skill, deepening your understanding and practicing makes you better and faster.
    • Sharing knowledge
      • Twitter has a low bar of entry, forces you revisit your notes, and serves a serendipity vehicle to meet like-minded people.
      • Emails and memos help you describe problems, think of possible solutions, and gather feedback.
      • Blogging help you to reflect on lessons learned and establish you as a thought-leader.
      • When you write guides you become intimately familiar with the problem and solution.
      • Courses help you to digest the concepts and skills to such a level that they become part of you, effectively making you an expert.

  • 32:55 Choosing the right learning materials

    • Aligning goals and materials
      • Visualize your vision for the future.
      • Identify your roles and corresponding responsibilities.
      • Spot the skills that will bring you closer to your vision while helping you now with your roles and responsibilities.
      • Choose the materials that will help you learn the 20% of ideas for 80% of the results.
      • Find the community of learners and experts that you can turn to when you’re stuck.
    • Finding your preferred formats
      • Limit the formats you learn from, as it makes mastery of each more likely.
      • Books are cheap and condense hundreds of hours of research. But: cut out the fluff.
      • Articles can contain gems, but you need to be able to spot the ones worth reading.
      • Videos are useful to learn motor-skills, but you need to become an expert note-taker to fully learn from them as they’re difficult to skim.
      • Podcasts are great when batched to break into a domain, but difficult to learn from directly.
      • Courses can take you from beginner to pro and give you access to an expert, but they tend to be costly and inefficient.
      • Social media like Twitter can be a great place for (free) ideas and materials and to find your community of fellow learners

  • 42:00 Selecting the tools to learn

    • Without technology, a learner’s mission becomes more complicated than is necessary.
    • Don’t nerd out over tools because of the tools. Use the tools that help you solve a problem. Ask: does this tool make my life easier or more complicated?
    • Use read-it-later apps and (web) highlighters to easily extract ideas and explanations from articles and books and process them later.
    • Use tablets and e-readers to comfortably consume large amounts of information and process them.
    • Use note-taking apps to capture your questions and insights. See it as taking care of your future self.
    • Leverage integration services to let your highlights and notes flow into your second brain (likely your note-taking tool).

  • 46:35 Leveraging tool-agnostic techniques

    • 47:23 Reading
      • See reading as an investment; you trade time and energy to become better in the future.
      • Know why you’re reading. What information are you looking for?
      • Have a fixed way of approaching articles and books; don’t figure out your approach as you’re reading.
      • Don’t reread the same materials over and over; you won’t learn more and only have the illusion of knowing.
      • Sönke Ahrens: "Most organizational decisions can be made up front, once and for all, by deciding on one system. … That leaves us with much more mental energy that we can direct towards more useful tasks, like trying to solve the problems in question.”
    • 51:36 Highlighting
      • Daniel Doyon (founder Readwise): If you highlight everything, you highlight nothing.
      • One of the most common mistakes learners make is highlighting material without knowing why they do it.
      • Take out the guessing; have a pre-defined way to highlight and limit yourself to one idea per highlight.
      • Cultivate the mindset of a curator and ask yourself: “Am I highlighting this because it truly resonates with me, or because I think ‘I should know this’?”
      • Do several passes of materials by skimming, reading and noticing interesting bits, before you highlight.
      • Make highlights understandable out-of-context (i.e. when exported).
      • Only capture the highlights that are most relevant to you.
    • 54:42 Note-taking
      • For every highlight, make a note in your own words.
      • Explain ideas in your notes as if you’re explaining them to someone else (you future self is also someone else).
      • Use as little words as possible.
      • Note-taking is just as much as about what you keep as what you choose to ignore.
      • Tiago Forte: “By standardizing and streamlining both the format of our notes and the steps by which we process them, the real work can come to the forefront: thinking, reflecting, writing, discussing, testing, and sharing. This is the work that adds value, and now we have the time to do it more effectively.”
    • 1:00:21 Review
      • The key: multiple passes. Ask about your highlights and notes: “What did I think was important and cool and is actually not important or cool?”
      • To reinforce learning, allow for forgetting by keeping some days between highlighting and note-taking and reviewing them.
      • Highlight the best parts of your highlights and notes (i.e. progressive summarization) and only save the ones you’ve marked up.
      • Use a networked note-taking tool so you can link your notes and see where ideas transfer to other domains.
      • If you want to have a conversation with your notes, start a Zettelkasten.
    • 1:05:22 Memorization
      • David Allen: “Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.”
      • Only memorize what you need to know in an instant and have no time to look up when you need the knowledge.
      • When you make practice active and spaced, allowing for some forgetting, you’ll remember much more than when you’d cram.
      • Use flashcards to program your attention using algorithms, taking out the guess work.
      • Don’t like flashcards? Test yourself with writing prompts to revisit ideas. Bonus points when combined with a spaced repetition algorithm.
    • 1:09:20 Deliberate practice
      • Ask yourself: “What’s my biggest sticking point with skill x?”
      • Design exercises that take you out of your comfort zone.
      • Create something useful, repeatedly.

Additional resources

How to design personal learning projects

3:10 Why plan your learning projects

  • Learning is hard. It’s easier to distract yourself with social media or television than to sit down and study. That’s why you need to be deliberate about when you’re going to spend time on acquiring the skills and knowledge that you desire.
  • When you reserve time and put it on your calendar to learn something new, you will subconsciously prioritize it.
  • When you plan for learning a skill, you can cut out the fluff and find the 20% of knowledge that leads to 80% of the results.
  • New to the skill? Prevent overwhelm by doing a short project of 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice. You’ll go from knowing absolutely nothing to performing noticeably well.

5:07 Drawing from Ultralearning and The First 20 Hours

  • What is Ultralearning?

    • Aggressive self-study strategy as described by Scott Young.
    • Applying the universal principles of learning to any skill.
    • Not meant to learn fast, but to reach your desired level of proficiency in the shortest time possible (be it a hacker or a master).

  • Why Ultralearn?

    • From How to Start Your Own Ultralearning Project (Part One):

      • “Ultralearning projects are hard. But the trade-off is that intense focus enables rapid learning progress. Eliminating distractions, learning the hardest parts first, driving at your weaknesses and investing concrete chunks of time all enable you to take a learning endeavor that you might normally imagine learning over a few years and compress it into a few months.”

      • “Ultralearning can allow you to push faster through the frustrating parts and get more quickly to a level where continuing mastery is enjoyable and fun.”

      • "Self-education is results-driven. It doesn’t matter which resources you use, as long as you get to the point. I could skip assignments I didn’t think would help me master the material. I could watch lectures faster if they were boring, rewatch them if I was confused. Optimizing for faster learning, in turn, also optimized for being completely engaged with learning.

        Ultralearning is more interesting because everything you do feels like it actually matters."

      • “Ultralearning is a skill. Once you’ve mastered the process you can repeat it again and again on anything you want to learn. It’s also a skill that’s becoming increasingly valuable. Workers are expected to adapt faster and faster to new ways of doing things. The best in the profession are earning ever more than the average. Flexible, rapid learners have a golden opportunity, while those who struggle to keep up are going to find it harder and harder to survive.”

  • What does The First 20 Hours teach us?

    • The principles to decide your wanted outcome(s) with a skill.
    • An approach to deconstruct any skill and learn it in logical order.
    • Concrete examples of how to deconstruct skills.

12:40 How to scope a learning project

The principles below are taken from Josh Kaufman’s book “The First 20 Hours.”

1. Choose a lovable project

  • “The best things that can happen to a human being is to find a problem, to fall in love with that problem, and to live trying to solve that problem, unless another problem even more lovable appears.” —Karl Popper

  • The more excited you’re about your desired skill, the more work you’ll put in, the more quickly you’ll acquire the skill.

2. Focus you energy on one skill at the time

  • Constant switching between learning different skills slows you down.
  • Focusing on one skill at the time means saying no to learning other skills—for now.
  • Put other things you want to learn on a someday/maybe list (GTD style).

3. Define your target performance level

  • “A problem well stated is a problem half solved.” —Charles Kettering

  • What does “good enough” look like? Or: How well must you be able to perform your desired skill?
  • Write a single sentence description of what you want to be able to do when you’re done with your prioject. The more specific, the better.
  • Visualization helps to discover your wanted outcome.
  • Important: Mastery is not the goal of rapid skill acquisition. Shoot for capacity, not perfection.

4. Deconstruct the skill into subskills

  • Deconstructing a skill helps to reduce overwhelm.
  • Break down your desired skill into the smallest possible parts.
  • Foundational subskills emerge as you deconstruct the main skill. Make sure you focus on those first.
  • Select the 20% of foundational skills that give 80% of the desired result (again, don’t aim for perfection).

5. Obtain critical tools

  • Most skills need specific tools to practice and perform well.
  • Ask yourself: “What tools, component, and environment do I need to have access to before I can practice efficiently?”
    • Follow-up question: “How can I obtain the best tools that I can find and afford?”
  • Preparing your tools and (practice) environment before you start learning a skill will save you a lot of time so you can maximize practice time.

6. Eliminate barriers to practice

  • What barriers (time, equipment, environment) are there that could get in the way of practice?
  • Potential barriers and how to solve them:
    • High prepractice effort, meaning that it takes a lot of time of effort to set up your tools and/or environment.
      • Potential solution: keep your tools in a specific place, together, and easily accessible. Optionally dedicate a room (or computer) to your learning project.
    • Limited resource availability, for example because you have to rely on borrow tools or practice environments.
      • Potential solution: Acquire the equipment yourself, or make appointments way in advance so there’s less up to chance (also acts as a forcing function).
    • Distractions, like the television, your telephone, other notifications.
      • Potential solution: dedicate a room/computer to your learning project or use apps that turn off any potential distraction.
    • Emotional blocks, such as fear, doubt, and embarrassment.
      • Potential solution: connect with fellow learners and talk about your emotional struggles while learning. Chances are, they experience the same challenges. Alternatively, push through fear for embarrassment with deliberate practice (embrace discomfort).

7. Make dedicated time for practice

  • Nobody finds time; you need to make time. If you rely on chance to learn, it will never get done.
  • Set aside large, dedicated blocks of time to learn and practice. The more time for deep learning, the better.
  • Spend at least 90 minutes per day learning by cutting low-value activities—like consuming (social) media.
  • Precommit to complete at least 20 hours of deliberate practice, or choose another skill you do want to spend the time on.
    • By precommitting you’re much more likely to push through the most frustrating parts of learning any skill.

8. Create fast feedback loops

  • Fast feedback = getting accurate information about how you’re performing, as quickly as possible.
  • Short feedback loops make it easier to connect the feedback to your actions, meaning it’s easier to make adjustments.
    • Skills like programming have short feedback loops because of the errors that computers spit out.
  • If the skill itself doesn’t give accurate feedback, coaches can give you immediate feedback and recommend adjustments.
  • The faster you can integrate feedback in your practice, the faster you’ll learn the skill.

9. Practice by the clock in short bursts

  • To avoid overestimating how much you’ve practiced or giving up too early, set a timer and practice until it runs out.
  • If you use a pomodoro timer, strive for 3-5 practice sessions every day.

10. Emphasize quantity and speed

  • Don’t aim to be perfect. Instead, focus on practicing as much as you can as fast as you can, while keeping “good enough” form.
  • Aim for 80-90% accuracy compared to your target performance level before increasing your practice speed.

33:10 How to choose learning materials

  • What topic am I going to learn and what is approximately the scope?

    • Before you can learn anything, you need to be clear about what you’re going to learn and why you’re going to learn it. No plan fails faster than one that has no motivation behind it.
    • You first need to gain a clear picture of your wanted outcomes before you can decide what you will precisely learn. The more specific your learning scope, the better.

  • How have others successfully learned this skill or domain?

    • Look on online forums or in your circle of friends and family for people who have already learned what you want to learn, and see what approach they used.
    • You don’t need to emulate others, but as you speak to more experts you’ll see patterns emerge of things you should learn.

  • What are the primary resources I’m going to use?

    • Define the books, videos, tutorials, classes and teachers you’re going to use. Also define your starting point.
    • The more specific you are about what resources you will use when, the better.
    • Example: “Do three exercises every day from the book Python Crash Course”

  • What direct practice activities will I use?

    • Try to identify how you can use your new skill or knowledge as soon as possible in a real setting. If direct practice isn’t possible, look for activities that mimic reality as much as possible.

  • What are my backup materials and drills?

    • To start off, it’s good to select a narrow set of materials to learn from so you don’t get overwhelmed. But, it’s wise to have backup materials in case your primary materials don’t cut it or don’t cover something that you found to be important.

47:59 How to schedule learning activities

  • How many weeks will my learning project take?

    • It’s important to determine the length of your learning project. How long will it take to reach your goals? Be realistic.
    • It’s generally better to keep your learning projects short; between 4 and 12 weeks.
    • Short, intensive learning projects have a higher chance of success, as there are fewer potential interruptions.
    • If you want to build a large skillset, break up your learning project into smaller projects of a month each.

  • How much time am I going to spend learning deliberately each week?

    • How much time you can spend on your learning project is often dictated by your schedule.
    • Nobody has time, so you need to make time.
    • Take a careful look and see how many hours you can spend on the project, each , taking into consideration the total length of your learning project so you don’t burn out.

  • When am I going to study or practice each day?

    • What days and times can you consistently dedicate to learning? It’s important to make learning a habit, so find the same recurring spots in your schedule.
    • Adapt your learning moments to the type of learning tasks you’ll be doing. Some skills benefit from short, spaced repetition. Other skills, like writing and programming, benefit more from longer sessions.
    • Think of specific days you have more time, or if you can reserve time for learning at the beginning or end of you days.

  • Have I reserved my learning sessions in my calendar?

    • When you schedule the hours of learning work you’re going to put in, you get a sense of what’s ahead. It’ll help you see potential scheduling conflicts, and it will prime your mind to learn.
    • If you’re willing to reserve time in your schedule, you’re more likely to put in the time to study.

54:59 Next: Executing and reflecting on your plan

  • Focus

    • When am I focused, and when am I multitasking and distracted?
    • When am I skipping learning sessions or procrastinating?
    • How long does it takes to get into a flow state during a learning session?
    • How long can I sustain focus before my mind starts to wander?
    • For the type of learning activity I just did, should I be more concentrated for intensity or more diffuse for creativity?

  • Drill

    • What are the weakest points of my performance I should spend time focusing on?
    • What’s the step in the skill that’s holding me back?
    • When I feel my progress is slowing down and I feel that I need to learn too much, what are the smaller parts I can split the skill into?

  • Retrieval

    • How much time do I spend reading and reviewing, and how much time solving problems and recalling things from memory?
    • How do I test my skill or understanding to avoid the illusion of competence?
    • How can I make sure I can explain what I learned in a day, a week, or year from now?

  • Feedback

    • How do I get feedback on my performance?
    • What did I learn well during this learning session?
    • What did I not learn well during this learning session?
    • What 20% of the feedback am I going to use to improve next?

  • Retention

    • How will I remember what I learn now for the long term?
    • How have I spaced out reviewing what I learned now in the future?
    • What factual knowledge have I learned and how will I apply it?
    • What foundational part(s) of the skill should I practice more, even if I’d overlearn it?

  • Intuition

    • What parts of the new knowledge do I have to memorize, and how can I understand it more deeply?
    • How would I explain what I just learned to someone else?
    • Why is what I just learned true?
    • How does this knowledge relate to what I already know?

  • Experimentation

    • Where am I getting stuck with my current resources and techniques?
    • Where would it be beneficial to branch out and try new approaches to reach my goal?
    • How can I go beyond the basics and try out stuff others haven’t explored before?

Additional resources

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Hi @Ramses, I wanted to reach out to you with this idea in my head, before the Learning Sprint. To be fair, I’d intended to post this the middle of last week, but time flew by. Also, wasn’t quite sure whether to stick it here or maybe in the Feedback section, so please feel free to move it.

My main challenge, what I want to explore, is coming to Logseq from a ‘static’ Folder Structure note-taking app. I have been using MS OneNote 2007 for years. I liked the older version, non-cloud integrated. Yes I often had the question, where to put the info (which section, sub-section etc, new page or add onto existing page), but for the most part it worked, if a bit messy and unstructured. I describe it as ‘static’, with intention. The most challenging aspect of Logseq for me, is ‘imagining what it can become’ for me.

I’m not a coder. I think you said recently that the main ‘new user’ growth area is non-technical types, people just like me (I’m advanced enough with using digital, I just don’t know code). So, how is it for us, coming into this new world? The main challenge for me, as I say, is in imagining what this weird, dynamic new way of working, could become. I have said elsewhere here, that intuitively, Logseq feels like the future for me, I just love it, it is exciting, it is calling to me to grow with it, but I don’t yet understand it.

I get, that it’s all about Blocks, and that Queries are going to help me, and Properties are something I must learn. But what I don’t yet envision, is what my new Knowledge World is ultimately going to become.

It’s not just about ‘understanding the technical feature set’, it’s also about feeling what it can become.

Someone wrote that for beginners, you just have to start writing, and see where it takes you. I get that. But I need to have ‘a bit of an idea’ of where it’s going to go. Maybe I’m just greedy, and want to run before I can walk, but what I wanted to emphasise with this post, is that learning the technical features is one thing, but imagining what Logseq can become for me, is quite another.

From your company Core Values:
Logseq - core values

What we need to be, as newbie non-techy users, is imagining learners, to imagine what this new block-based, interlinked, organic, dynamic growing Second Brain, Graph, as-yet still unknown creature, can become in our lives. My old system was all laid out in front of me, in its sections and sub-sections. My new system, it promises much more, with its Blocks and Backlinks and Graph. But, with its completely new approach, it promises more, but it is so hard to imagine.

Here is a screenshot of my OneNote system that I have enjoyed for many years, and am happy to say goodbye to:

OneNote - Sonnenburg
OneNote - Sonnenburg1366×728 235 KB

Why am I saying goodbye to OneNote? Because Logseq feels like an important step forwards, a step up for me. But at the moment, it’s a big step into the unkown. The Learning Sprint I’m hoping will help me advance, and better get the hang of this whole new world.

I hope this makes sense, I guess I’m trying to say that I’m coming from something that I know like ‘the back of my hand’, to something I can’t yet imagine.

This is the real chalenge for us newbies.
(btw, a lot of what you write above already addresses this, but I wanted to put this out there anyway)

Edit: The screenshot I included shows my Visual Overview of my knowledge, with its Sections, Sub-sections, and Pages. Its all laid out and I know where it is (more or less). With this new way of thinking, it is all replaced by the Graph, as yet still an unknown quantity.

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In preparation for the Learning Sprint, I’m sticking this here, 'cause i’m not sure where else to put it:
Referring to your first video above (The power of keeping a learn log)

  • At 17:40 @Ramses says (about ideas he’s exploring) ‘these ideas, I keep them with me’. How? How and in what way do you ‘keep these ideas with you?’ (presumably spaced repetition?)

  • At 19:10 he says, (after ‘throwing everything in the Daily Journals page’), ‘and then have some kind of process to further process and refine, categorize, and structure those notes’.

    • Does this mean like the following: when you write down notes during the day, studying or at work or whatever, then later on when you get home you should write up those notes again (to review, refine, reinforce, summarise). So by writing in the Daily Journal (throwing everything in there), you then later should go back and link those notes (not move them, but link them) to … where?
    • Where do the ideas actually live? On the Daily Journals page, or as a block in the Blockosphere? Or on some other page collated together with other ideas (no, every idea lives in its own Block). So it doesn’t matter where the Block lives, so long as you have it connected to other related ideas/blocks???
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I just remind myself of my favorite questions when I pick something to read or watch. There’s no fancy system here, do whatever works for you. But if you remind yourself of what you want to focus on repeatedly, thinking of it before picking content to consume will become a habit.

Could be different places, but I do “just in time learning.” So I might just search/query for something that I need an answer for. For example, how to do something in CSS. If I find that I keep returning to that note, I just add #card to review it as a flashcard. There’s no strict checklist that I decide against.

Block live in branches. A page is a branch, but on a page there can be multiple branches. I don’t overthink things, I just add tags/links so I can resurface things. What matters is that I actually return to my stored knowledge so I know it’s there (you can’t look for something you don’t know exists).

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Brilliant. I’ll stick with it and it will become clear :+1:

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Hi Ramses,

Thanks for sharing these resources, they are so helpful! Not just for this learning sprint but in general (planning to share them with my colleagues at work! I am that person that always shares new resources and tips for learning and working effectively).

My approach to this learning sprint is to tackle it together with my boyfriend (we are both enthusiastic about Logseq!). Unfortunately I can’t watch the Wednesday talks live due to work commitments but we have dedicated time this weekend to catch up and go through all the resources.

Doing this together also really helps with motivation. This is one thing I learned from James Clear book Atomic Habits which is to have an accountability partner. So we’re doing this together, making sure we dedicate enough time, but we also have our own learning goals.

Looking forward to the journey :smile:

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I identify quite strongly with this!

In every-day life I am considered a fairly technical person by people around me. It’s not my background, and I don’t code. But fixing things in Linux, running a home server, using regular expressions describe my skillset pretty well.

I have used Tiddlywiki for quite a long time, and the advantage of tiddlywiki was that there were so many public examples. And because of the way that Tiddlywiki works, I could always open the editor in other people’s Tiddlywiki and see how a query they used worked under the hood.

On paper, Tiddlywiki had endless possibilities. But it’s not a note taking applicating, but a note organizing application. Logseq is different. The amount of features that are a few key-presses away are actually more numerous in Logseq.

In this sprint I am having some trouble setting goals because I just want to look at a bunch of real life examples of how people are using Logseq. Just to shop around and see ‘competing methodologies’.

Hypothetical examples with placeholders like “Concept” are really no use when I want to use Logseq for longer learning projects. The community hub is an excellent initiative which is definitely going to be helpful. But a ‘community graph’, or a way that others can showcase their way of organizing knowledge that I can see in enough detail so I can understand is what would be most helpful.

I mentioned competition earlier. Would it make sense to organize a competition where a bunch of data a scenario and goal are provided, with the question “organize this in Logseq the best way you can and showcase this”. It might create resources that would address the issue that I have for myself and many others.

update: I just realised that you asked people to post their learn log and to update it throughout the sprint. Hopefully this will already generate some good resources.

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Welcome to the community, @jenn! :wave: And thank you for the kind words.

I LOVE this! That’s exactly my aim with talking about learning how to learn: so we can help each other as professionals.

YES! That’s exactly why I structured this as a social learning experience. I could try to create learning materials myself, but learning from each other is much more motivating than a self-paced course IMHO.

Great to see you have an accountability partner so close to you. I’ve also done learning sprints together with my girlfriend and can recommend it to every couple, even if you have different learning goals.

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I get this. But I am also thinking like @Smithy , in this thread. He stresses the point that the new user should also have some idea (or imagining) about what his logseq graph will become (in structure) overtime. This is necessary because inconsistent structuring can result in block (or, note) loss (or, failure in “resurfacing” as you say) during using query filters.

For example, I am trying to get my “Book Notes” into Logseq. Before logseq, I was using https://jrnl.sh which is a quite straightforward terminal based note taking tool. My booknotes were living under their @tags, which were generally their book names.

But now with Logseq, I should learn about Query’ing, and this also makes it necessary for me to learn how to properly “tag” my notes. I just realized that there are “Page Tags” and “Block Tags”. There are also special “tags” (like, default tags?) which are recognized by Logseq already, implicitly.

I also get some conflicting reports from other users. On the one hand @Ramses recommends dumping everything that you want to take note of to the day’s Journal page. With proper wikilinks and hashtags (which, I also learned that they are functionally the same, but also have nuances and cosmetic differences). Some other users recommend creating separate pages for book notes and stuff.

Now I am here, wondering, as I get on with using Logseq, how should I use it so that I can find my Book Notes when I filter them in different ways using queries? Should I mainly have pages per books, and thus use “Page Properties” for structuring and grouping different books under the same author, keywords, etc.; OR, should I dump every book note under the day’s Journal page, but use wikilinks as block headers, and thus use “Block Properties” to group the books.

These are real speed bumps in my use of Logseq. I want to get a (somewhat) solid system of note-taking going on (which I will use consistently for a long time, for a set purpose), before I start collecting tidbits of info in my logseq pages which will be a mess to make sense of.

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For each note/block, there is info of:

  • secondary value:
    • it is served best by tags
    • it may be about:
      • when the note was taken
        • e.g. the date of a journal
      • what triggered its taking
        • e.g. reading a specific chapter of a particular book
      • what TODOs it triggered itself
      • etc.
  • primary value:
    • it may be about:
      • What concept this note is about.
        • served best by the page the note is in
      • What connections it makes to other concepts.
        • served best by inline references

Dates are (very) convenient (and yet) illusions.

  • Usually we are not immediately sure of what concept a note is about
    • Until we decide, it is convenient to keep this note in the journal of the date of its creation.
  • But a note may:
    • have multiple candidates for its date:
      • date of conception
      • date of being written down
      • date of some event it refers to
        • could even be a future date
    • be edited after its creation-date
      • Such edits make its date less important.
  • This is just one more reason to move the note when we figure out its true destination.
    • But not earlier.
    • We may or may not leave behind a reference.

Other posts on the topic:

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Cool write-up, thanks! Mostly interesting in the “learning how to learn” aspect, rather than the “how that relates to Logseq” aspect. Some stuff there I already know well, lots of new bits, or pieces that I kind of know that you’ve reframed in useful ways. I reckon I’ll come back to this.

Couple of points to add:

  • I think there is a lot of difference between learning knowledge and learning a skill. I think there are some general things you can say about each.
    • Knowledge is:
      • Understanding processes (e.g. by building models), and
      • Remembering facts
      • Being able to communicate or use that information is what makes knowledge useful
      • Knowledge questions are things like “Why?”, and “How?” and “How much?”
    • Skill is:
      • Understanding how to do something
        • (which is largely pattern recognition, I think - in situation A, do B), and
      • Having the muscle memory to do it well.
        • (many skills don’t really involved much actual muscle control in a meaningful way, e.g. writing, in those cases, this is more of a metaphor - it’s the understanding of how to apply what you know)
      • Some skills also have a creativity component,
        • which I think is something like the ability to combine known patterns in novel ways, to produce a new situation.
      • Skill questions are “How do I …?”
  • I suspect thinking about how to approach those two things differently is worthwhile
    • I haven’t really got any solid thoughts on this bit yet, but:
    • Knowledge doesn’t have a practical component, so practicing is not very meaningful,
      • although memory building exercises may be with specific types of knowledge
    • Conversely, reading and understanding the how of something will not help build a skill if what you’re missing is the muscle memory component
      • rote learning and memorisation is useless for most skills
  • I also think there is substantial overlap between them, for instance
    • Understanding how a thing works (knowledge) can help you learn how to do a thing (skill)
    • Conversely, doing a thing and receiving feedback on it can help you to better understand how it works
    • Pattern recognition in particular is relevant to both
      • in knowledge, it’s what tells you that a particular process is happening (and that your mental model is applicable)
      • in skill, it’s what tells you what do do next
      • Pattern recognition building can often really benefit from a tight theory-practice cycle.
        • I learned this best when learning to play Go. The process there is:
          • Play a few games. Lose a lot.
          • Pay attention to what happened that lead to your loss (review the game, ask opponents for feedback)
          • Go to the theory libraries, and read up on pattern knowledge, and think about how it would have helped
          • Play more games. Lose a lot (but less). Repeat.
          • Go is almost archetypal in this regard, because the game is basically pure pattern matching, with no temporal component.
    • Communication is also a skill in itself
      • and it feeds back into learning and solidifying knowledge, as you mentioned in your “sharing knowledge” section.
    • All patterns/models (and thinking in general) boils down to analogy-making (see e.g. Hofstader and Sander’s Surfaces and Essences), and being able to apply a pattern/model from one situation to a substantially different situation can be incredibly useful, both in learning to understand something, AND in learning to do something.
    • Examples are really killer when learning new complex knowledge, because they root difficult-to-grasp concepts in the real world and in narrative, which makes it easier for the human brain to grasp.
      • I think learning projects are an analogue to this in skill-building.
        • For example, it’s common in wood-working to start out by making a simple box. In doing so, you learn a lot of basics about cutting, measuring, joining, and finishing. Next time you do a more complex project, you can think back to that example and relate aspects of it to your new project by analogy.

I guess you could use my list when considering any given new thing that you want to learn, in order to know which aspects of your lists are the most important.

Also, there are other things you can learn, like habits, values, and preferences. Not sure, but I think those are slightly different things. Maybe they align with skill building more, because they would have a practice component? There are books focussing on some of them, like James Clear’s Atomic Habits, or Redirect by Timothy Wilson (focus on learning new self-narratives).

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