This piece is a writing assignment for the Learning How To Learn online class, in which we are asked to reflect on a recent learning challenge.

Shorthand—the ability to write at possibly over 200 words per minute—is a dying skill. The ubiquitous use of computers and laptops for taking notes and meeting minutes has turned shorthand into a curiosity, a skill reserved for a dying generation or some die-hard hobbyists. Which is a shame—there’s a kind of elegance and beauty to some of the shorthand systems out there, and who wouldn’t want to be able to write and read scripts like this:

Shorthand belongs to a family of skills that were considered essential perhaps 50 years ago, but have been made all but obsolete by technology, such as:

• Using a slide ruler
• Note taking
• Touch typing
• Handwriting
• Mnemotechnics
• Shorthand

Yet I claim that many of these, if not most, should still be taught in our primary schools; in this piece I reflect on my experience in learning the Gregg Shorthand system.

As far as knowledge work goes, I’ve had a rather typical education: Master in Physics, PhD in Physics, self-taught in Computer Programming, Statistics, and Data Science. I’ve always taken my professional development very seriously and have almost always got some MOOC going on.

Being something of a compulsive note taker, I became interested in the various shorthand systems in 2005. I researched the different systems, and concluded that the Gregg system would be ideal for me, striking a good balance between ease of learning vs writing speed. So I began to learn the system, relying at first on the vast collection of free resources available online.

But in the last 14 years or so, my enthusiasm for learning shorthand has ebbed and flowed. My commitment to learning went through spikes and valleys. I never lost interest, but other interests would inevitably take priority. With hindsight, I believe the three largest mental hurdles were the following:

• No incentive: I never entertained any illusion of gaining something tangible from learning shorthand, so my only motivation was my own curiosity.
• Lack of resources: in spite of the website mentioned above, I feel that there aren’t that many resources out there for learning shorthand. I couldn’t find any reading material written in shorthand, for example. Nor could I find any online class.
• Lack of priority: just as with anything else, the first excuse for dropping out will be the lack of time. But that’s seldom the root cause. More likely, I would frequently let other things take priority over the regular practice time needed for learning a new skill such as shorthand.

So what to do? How to get good at shorthand, when the only tangible benefit, to be honest, is the satisfaction of having learned something cool? Here is what seems to be working for me:

• The book: the free resources available online are absolutely incredible, but they’re, well, free. When I download a free book I’m not vested in it; there’s no sunk cost, so no compulsion to make something good come out of my “loss”. Not so with a physical book. I bought The GREGG Shorthand Manual Simplified, so that I would feel bad whenever I saw the book on my desk gathering dust.
• The community: sharing a ridiculous obsession with others is always more fun than being alone. I discovered a Reddit group dedicated to shorthand in general, and I joined it. Being part of such a community was a great boost to my motivation, and provided me with a place to ask questions about difficult reading exercises.
• Self-testing: the book mentioned above features many reading exercises, but doesn’t give the answers. It made it difficult for me to assess whether I was making progress. Instead, I discovered that AnkiApp, one of many flashcards apps out there, would let me download and install a deck of flashcards for practising shorthand reading.
  But what about the book’s reading exercises? How could I make sure I understood them correctly without bothering the Reddit community? I discovered a website where you can enter text in English, and it would be rendered into Gregg shorthand (to this day, I have been unable to locate a tool that would read Gregg and turn it into English). I now had all the necessary means to test myself.

Practising Gregg shorthand has now been part of my daily routine for the past couple of months; I can read the Lord’s Prayer above, albeit slowly. I am still far from being able to take meeting notes in shorthand, but I’m confident I will be able to do so in a few months.

“Learning How To Learn” (LHTL), an online course freely available on Coursera, teaches techniques for becoming a better learner and thinker. Given by Dr Barbara Oakley (McMaster University) and Dr Terrence Sejnowski (University of California San Diego), the course covers the latest on how the brain works and suggests practices to make the best it.

Many of these practices are covered in numerous popular self-improvement books and you may be familiar with some of them, but it was great to have them collected in a single place, including explanations on why they work. Here are some that resonated the most with me.

Focused & Diffuse Modes

Keeping focused on a single task for hours ends up working against you. The brain needs time away to form new connections and get a sense of the big picture. Going against that flow will likely hinder your progress and leave you exhausted at the end of the day.

The evidence suggests that the brain works in either of two modes, which the instructors call “focused” and “diffuse”. In focused mode you concentrate on your task at hand, while in the diffuse mode you let go and give your mind a break; this is the kind of thinking you do when you are not consciously thinking, like when you go for a walk or take a shower. If you have ever enjoyed flashes of insights that came during such activities, it was probably diffuse mode at work.

I couldn’t help drawing obvious parallels with the rich vs linear modes of thinking described by Betty Edwards in “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain“, and also neatly summarized by Andy Hunt in “Pragmatic Thinking and Learning“. It is obviously the explanation for techniques used by unusually creative people like Thomas Edison or Salvador Dali, who would take a nap and figured out tricks to wake up just at the onset of dreams; whatever they were thinking at that moment was probably the output of the diffuse mode. I believe Andy Hunt called that technique an “onar”, a portmanteau of oniric (which pertains to dreams) and sonar.

Deliberate practice

You might be familiar with the idea that it takes roughly 10’000 hours of practice to become a world-class expert at anything. Malcolm Gladwell is generally credited with popularizing this idea in his book “Outliers“, but later research has qualified this idea. As pointed out by Geoff Colvin in “Talent Is Overrated“, by Anders Ericsson in “Peak“, and by many others, any random kind of practice is not enough. Merely repeating the same skill over and over won’t do; one needs to be intentional, even deliberate about one’s practice. Hence the name Deliberate Practice.

I suspect that Deliberate Practice is far easier to apply in sports or arts than in knowledge work. Most sports and most arts have a long teaching tradition—there are moves, techniques, steps, swings, katas, scales, chords, chess tactics, strokes that can be practiced over and over again, often under a coach’s supervision. Identifying your weaknesses, and developing a workout routine to address them, seems to me to be far easier in, say, freestyle swimming than in computer programming.

So I’m not so sure how to best apply Deliberate Practice when learning a new subject such as mathematics, physics, computer programming, or any similar mostly-intellectual topic. I’m not sure there exists a body of, say, mathematical drills one can perform in order to become better at it. Computer programming might be an exception here: people (including me) have experimented with so-called code katas, where you solve (sometimes repeatedly) some programming problem. But that’s the closest thing to Deliberate Practice we have to date.

Procrastination

The course explains that procrastination is the brain’s natural defense mechanism against unpleasant tasks, such as sitting down to study. A valuable technique against this is the Pomodoro technique: you make a deal with yourself that you will only work for 25 minutes, then take a break. You might even bribe your brain with the promise of some treat after work: perhaps some social media time, or reddit, or twitter. (A very similar idea was proposed in The Power of Now.)

I’ve been using variations on the Pomodoro technique for many years now (I was introduced to it by the book of the same name published by the Pragmatic Programmers). I regularly work in 25 minute bursts, punctuated by 5 min breaks. During the breaks, I will frequently walk around, perhaps fetch fruit from the cafeteria three floors upstairs, or visit the bathroom. Of late I’ve experimented with the use of Brain.fm, setting their timer to 30 minutes. I find this very effective at improving my focus and blocking out distractions from the surrounding open space.

Metaphors

Metaphors are said to be a great way to internalize what you learn, though I don’t think I use that technique very much in my own learning. I have, however, been told that I’m pretty good at using metaphors and analogies when I explain technical concepts to a non-technical audience. Recently I’ve been working on a statistical model of the effectiveness of calls to action sent to customers, using a class of models called Survival Analysis. Originally developed to model the survival of patients in a clinical setting, it was rather easy to build the right metaphors: an email you send to your customer gives “birth” in his mind to a certain inclination to do something; that inclination can either “die” when it is acted upon, or “live on” forever if the customer never does anything about it. That kind of metaphor made it easy to communicate the gist of a highly technical subject.

Self-testing

When you sit down and study something, you will frequently end the study session overestimating what you’ve really internalized. This is also known as the illusion of competence. The best defense against this, and also a great way to consolidate what you have learned, is to test yourself: not only right after the course, but also at regular intervals thereafter. This is sometimes called Spaced Repetition.

Self-testing is, indeed, why the Cornell system of note taking works so well: you’re supposed to summarize, in your own words, the content of your notes at the end of the note-taking session. Recently I came across a fine piece on Medium by Robyn Scott who tells of a habit consisting of spending 30 seconds (not more, not less) after every important event in your life, writing down your own summary of the event.

Sleep

Nobody questions the benefits of sleep on thinking and learning, so I won’t berate the point. But the instructors included a little nugget of wisdom: before you go to sleep, they recommend going over your current to-do list (or personal kanban board, which is the only system that ever worked for me) and select 3-5 items that you commit to doing the next day. That way your brain won’t worry about what to do the next day; your “to-do” will be sitting there ready for you, and your brain will have more freedom to mull over more important things while you sleep—such as internalizing what you’ve learned during the day.

Conclusion

I don’t have time to cover all the tips and tricks, so I’ll have to stop here. The course is not over yet but I’m thoroughly enjoying it. There’s some material that I was already more or less aware of, and it’s great to review it again (spaced repetition, remember?) But there’s also plenty of genuinely new material, and I appreciate having it presented in such a clear and lucid manner by the instructors.