Attention is cheap. Engagement is gold. The value of cognitive effort.

Yesterday this video showed up on my YouTube recommendation feed. Benjamin Keep, PhD, JD – What makes something memorable? https://youtu.be/UW4EMIucmHs Judging by the title, initially I thought it’s about writing techniques, but apparently it’s specifically about learning. Fortunately, learning is still one topic I’m into and I had some time during a commute, so I…

Get back into the habit of writing (yet again)

So. As part of my latest attempt in untangling this writing paralysis, last Tuesday I promised my therapist to publish two posts to Substack by the end of today. I had one full week but only started dusting off my writing environment on Saturday. Tinkered with some drafts, captured new ideas, but unable to fully…

How To Do Sketchnoting Even If You Can’t Draw – a lesson with Emily of the Sketchnote Academy

Rediscovered this video on my hard drive, realised I’ve never watched it. It’s been 10 months since I last played with sketchnoting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evLCAYlx4Kw&ab_channel=TheHappyEverCrafter The part that interests me the most is about layouts (20 minutes in). Deciding where to start sketching and not knowing how large it will end up is the part where I…

The Real Challenge with Problem Solving

Hello again my friend. Hope things are well with you near the end of this year. A couple of months ago I shared this observation on LinkedIn: The real challenge with problem solving is rarely in coming up with the solution but rather: Communication: getting people to agree what the problem is Decision: which solution…

Sketchnoting: Visual Notetaking for More Effective Learning

Saw this tweet earlier https://twitter.com/helenbevan/status/1333005570056523781 (Source: Impact Wales) They say the best way to learn is to teach. That is because (good) teaching forces you to digest and express what you know. You engage more parts of yourself, compared to passively (and often mindlessly) consuming the information. The act of drawing means you are actively…

SECI model

I’ve fallen into the trap of bottom upping again. Been organically following my curiosity, observing, and theorising about learning, thinking, knowledge and skill acquisition. Then I discovered there’s a name for this established field: Knowledge Management. And then after noodling around in my head with the idea of transformation of knowledge (tacit, explicit), only last…

Remembering more of what you read

3 ways to remember more of what you read: Know what you’re looking for (What do you want to get or achieve by reading this?) Take notes, paraphrase, reflect (active reading) Teach it / share the takeaways (forces you to externalise what you have read in your own words) And a bonus trick: Read it…

Inefficient communication: yes please!

I am learning to be less efficient in my communication. Lately I realised I am too obsessed about communicating efficiently that it hurts the effectiveness. I am not getting my message across as well as I could. My tendency is to distill what I want to say into the most precise and succinct set of…

Sins of Modern Communication: Knowledge Worker’s Communication Guide (part 6)

Let’s now take one extra step and attempt to distil everything we’ve learned so far into 16 sins of Modern Communication. 1. Not aware of your Intent (change behavior, change mental state, change emotional state) 2. Not documenting before conversing (missing Context) 3. Not documenting after conversing (vaporising Content) 4. Diverging aimlessly (false Maturity, likely…