Learning How to Learn

In essence people have two fundamentally different modes of thinking: focused and diffuse. 
 
Focused Mode
- has tight spacing for the rubber bumpers, which seems to, in some sense help keep your thoughts concentrated. 
- is centered on the prefrontal cortex and it often seems to involve thinking about things you are somewhat familiar with. 
- stepping along the somewhat familiar pathways 
 
Diffuse Mode
- has more widely spaced bumpers that allow for more broad ranging ways of thinking. 
- to solve or figure out something new
 
When we find ourselves stuck on a problem, or even if we're unsure of a situation, the course of living our daily life. It's often a good idea once you've focused directly on the situation. To let things settle back and take a bit more time. That way more neural processing can take place, often below conscious awareness in the diffuse mode. The thing is it often takes time for neural processing to take place, and time, as well, to build the new neural structures that allow us to learn something new. 
 
It's through practice and repetition that we can help enhance and strengthen the neural structures we're building as we're learning something new. Practice and repetition is particularly important for more abstract topics. 

Working Memory vs Long Term Memory

Memory of course is an important aspect of learning. There are four slots in our working memory. Things can fall out of those slots unless we keep repeating them to hold them in mind. In that sense working memory is like a not very good blackboard. 

Long term memory, on the other hand, is like a storage warehouse. If you practiced and repeated something well enough to get it into long-term memory, you can usually call it up later if you need, although you may need an occasional bit of repetition to freshen the memory up. 

It's never a good idea to cram your learning by repeating things many times all in one day. Because that's like trying to build muscle by lifting weights all in one day there's no time for solid structures to grow. 

- Barbara Oakley, Learning How to Learn, by Deep Teaching Solutions.

Future-focused Time Management

One way of understanding capitalism, in fact, is as a giant machine for instrumentalizing everything it encounters—the earth’s resources, your time and abilities (or “human resources”)—in the service of future profit. Seeing things this way helps explain the otherwise mysterious truth that rich people in capitalist economies are often surprisingly miserable. They’re very good at instrumentalizing their time, for the purpose of generating wealth for themselves; that’s the definition of being successful in a capitalist world. But in focusing so hard on instrumentalizing their time, they end up treating their lives in the present moment as nothing but a vehicle in which to travel toward a future state of happiness. And so their days are sapped of meaning, even as their bank balances increase.
 
This is also the kernel of truth in the cliché that people in less economically successful countries are better at enjoying life—which is another way of saying that they’re less fixated on instrumentalizing it for future profit, and are thus more able to participate in the pleasures of the present. Mexico, for example, has often outranked the United States in global indices of happiness. Hence the old parable about a vacationing New York businessman who gets talking to a Mexican fisherman, who tells him that he works only a few hours per day and spends most of his time drinking wine in the sun and playing music with his friends.
 
Appalled at the fisherman’s approach to time management, the businessman offers him an unsolicited piece of advice: if the fisherman worked harder, he explains, he could invest the profits in a bigger fleet of boats, pay others to do the fishing, make millions, then retire early. “And what would I do then?” the fisherman asks. “Ah, well, then,” the businessman replies, “you could spend your days drinking wine in the sun and playing music with your friends.”
 

- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, 2021

Standing Firm to Resist FOMO

In practical terms, a limit-embracing attitude to time means organizing your days with the understanding that you definitely won’t have time for everything you want to do, or that other people want you to do—and so, at the very least, you can stop beating yourself up for failing. Since hard choices are unavoidable, what matters is learning to make them consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather than letting them get made by default—or deceiving yourself that, with enough hard work and the right time management tricks, you might not have to make them at all. It also means resisting the seductive temptation to “keep your options open”—which is really just another way of trying to feel in control—in favor of deliberately making big, daunting, irreversible commitments, which you can’t know in advance will turn out for the best, but which reliably prove more fulfilling in the end. And it means standing firm in the face of FOMO, the “fear of missing out,” because you come to realize that missing out on something—indeed, on almost everything—is basically guaranteed. Which isn’t actually a problem anyway, it turns out, because “missing out” is what makes our choices meaningful in the first place.
 
Time pressure comes largely from forces outside ourselves: from a cutthroat economy; from the loss of the social safety nets and family networks that used to help ease the burdens of work and childcare; and from the sexist expectation that women must excel in their careers while assuming most of the responsibilities at home. None of that will be solved by self-help alone; as the journalist Anne Helen Petersen writes in a widely shared essay on millennial burnout, you can’t fix such problems “with vacation, or an adult coloring book, or ‘anxiety baking,’ or the Pomodoro Technique, or overnight fucking oats.” But my point here is that however privileged or unfortunate your specific situation, fully facing the reality of it can only help. So long as you continue to respond to impossible demands on your time by trying to persuade yourself that you might one day find some way to do the impossible, you’re implicitly collaborating with those demands. Whereas once you deeply grasp that they are impossible, you’ll be newly empowered to resist them, and to focus instead on building the most meaningful life you can, in whatever situation you’re in.
 
This notion that fulfillment might lie in embracing, rather than denying, our temporal limitations wouldn’t have surprised the philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome. They understood limitlessness to be the sole preserve of the gods; the noblest of human goals wasn’t to become godlike, but to be wholeheartedly human instead. In any case, this is just how reality is, and it can be surprisingly energizing to confront it.
 
None of us can single-handedly overthrow a society dedicated to limitless productivity, distraction, and speed. But right here, right now, you can stop buying into the delusion that any of that is ever going to bring satisfaction. You can face the facts. You can turn on the shower, brace yourself for some invigoratingly icy water, and step in.
 

- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, 2021

 
 

Facing Our Finitude

For Heidegger, is the central challenge of human existence: since finitude defines our lives, he argues that living a truly authentic life—becoming fully human—means facing up to that fact. We must live out our lives, to whatever extent we can, in clear-eyed acknowledgment of our limitations, in the undeluded mode of existence that Heidegger calls “Being-towards-death,” aware that this is it, that life is not a dress rehearsal, that every choice requires myriad sacrifices, and that time is always already running out—indeed, that it may run out today, tomorrow, or next month. And so it’s not merely a matter of spending each day “as if” it were your last, as the cliché has it. The point is that it always actually might be. I can’t entirely depend upon a single moment of the future.
 
What most of us do, most of the time, instead of confronting our finitude, which is to indulge in avoidance and denial, or what Heidegger calls “falling.” Rather than taking ownership of our lives, we seek out distractions, or lose ourselves in busyness and the daily grind, so as to try to forget our real predicament. Or we try to avoid the intimidating responsibility of having to decide what to do with our finite time by telling ourselves that we don’t get to choose at all—that we must get married, or remain in a soul-destroying job, or anything else, simply because it’s the done thing.
 
Hägglund writes, “I could never take my life to be at stake, and I would never be seized by the need to do anything with my time.” Eternity would be deathly dull, because whenever you found yourself wondering whether or not to do any given thing, on any given day, the answer would always be: Who cares? After all, there’s always tomorrow, and the next day, and the one after that …
 

- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, 2021

Idleness Aversion: Inability to Rest

Social psychologists call this inability to rest “idleness aversion,” which makes it sound like just another minor behavioral foible; but in his famous theory of the “Protestant work ethic,” the German sociologist Max Weber argued that it was one of the core ingredients of the modern soul. It first emerged, according to Weber’s account, among Calvinist Christians in northern Europe, who believed in the doctrine of predestination—that every human, since before they were born, had been preselected to be a member of the elect, and therefore entitled to spend eternity in heaven with God after death, or else as one of the damned, and thus guaranteed to spend it in hell.
 
Early capitalism got much of its energy, Weber argued, from Calvinist merchants and tradesmen who felt that relentless hard work was one of the best ways to prove—to others, but also to themselves—that they belonged to the former category rather than the latter. Their commitment to frugal living supplied the other half of Weber’s theory of capitalism: when people spend their days generating vast amounts of wealth through hard work but also feel obliged not to fritter it away on luxuries, the inevitable result is large accumulations of capital.
 
It must have been a uniquely anguished way to live. There was no chance that all that hard work could improve the probability that one would be saved: after all, the whole point of the doctrine of predestination was that nothing could influence one’s fate. On the other hand, wouldn’t someone who already was saved naturally demonstrate a tendency toward virtuous striving and thriftiness? On this fraught understanding, idleness became an especially anxiety-inducing experience, to be avoided at all costs—not merely a vice that might lead to damnation if you overindulged in it, as many Christians had long maintained, but one that might be evidence of the horrifying truth that you already were damned.
 
To rest for the sake of rest—to enjoy a lazy hour for its own sake—entails first accepting the fact that this is it: that your days aren’t progressing toward a future state of perfectly invulnerable happiness, and that to approach them with such an assumption is systematically to drain our four thousand weeks of their value. “We are the sum of all the moments of our lives,” writes Thomas Wolfe, “all that is ours is in them: we cannot escape it or conceal it.” If we’re going to show up for, and thus find some enjoyment in, our brief time on the planet, we had better show up for it now.
 

- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, 2021

 

The Decline of Pleasure

Defenders of modern capitalism enjoy pointing out that despite how things might feel, we actually have more leisure time than we did in previous decades—an average of about five hours per day for men, and only slightly less for women. But perhaps one reason we don’t experience life that way is that leisure no longer feels very leisurely. Instead, it too often feels like another item on the to-do list. And like many of our time troubles, research suggests that this problem grows worse the wealthier you get. Rich people are frequently busy working, but they also have more options for how to use any given hour of free time: like anyone else, they could read a novel or take a walk; but they could equally be attending the opera, or planning a ski trip to Courchevel. So they’re more prone to feeling that there are leisure activities they ought to be getting around to but aren’t.
 
We probably can’t hope to grasp how utterly alien this attitude toward leisure would have seemed to anyone living at any point before the Industrial Revolution. To the philosophers of the ancient world, leisure wasn’t the means to some other end; on the contrary, it was the end to which everything else worth doing was a means. Aristotle argued that true leisure—by which he meant self-reflection and philosophical contemplation—was among the very highest of virtues because it was worth choosing for its own sake, whereas other virtues, like courage in war, or noble behavior in government, were virtuous only because they led to something else.
 
The Purpose of Rest
 
We have inherited from all this a deeply bizarre idea of what it means to spend your time off “well”—and, conversely, what counts as wasting it. In this view of time, anything that doesn’t create some form of value for the future is, by definition, mere idleness. Rest is permissible, but only for the purposes of recuperation for work, or perhaps for some other form of self-improvement. It becomes difficult to enjoy a moment of rest for itself alone, without regard for any potential future benefits, because rest that has no instrumental value feels wasteful.
 
The truth, then, is that spending at least some of your leisure time “wastefully,” focused solely on the pleasure of the experience, is the only way not to waste it—to be truly at leisure, rather than covertly engaged in future-focused self-improvement. In order to most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth. From this perspective, idleness isn’t merely forgivable; it’s practically an obligation. “If the satisfaction of an old man drinking a glass of wine counts for nothing,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir, “then production and wealth are only hollow myths; they have meaning only if they are capable of being retrieved in individual and living joy.”

- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, 2021

Time as a Resource

From thinking about time in the abstract, it’s natural to start treating it as a resource, something to be bought and sold and used as efficiently as possible, like coal or iron or any other raw material.
 
Previously, laborers had been paid for a vaguely defined “day’s work,” or on a piecework basis, receiving a given sum per bale of hay or per slaughtered pig. But gradually it became more common to be paid by the hour—and the factory owner who used his workers’ hours efficiently, squeezing as much labor as possible from each employee, stood to make a bigger profit than one who didn’t.
 
Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself, to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it. When you’re faced with too many demands, it’s easy to assume that the only answer must be to make better use of time, by becoming more efficient, driving yourself harder, or working for longer—as if you were a machine in the Industrial Revolution—instead of asking whether the demands themselves might be unreasonable. It grows alluring to try to multitask.
 

- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, 2021