Hack Continuous Learning with This One Easy Trick

I’m going to share something that helped me cope with the FOMO I had trying to keep up with the overwhelming amount of great books, newsletters (cough!), articles, and podcasts about leadership and product management. A couple years ago I felt like I was just always behind. I couldn’t keep up with my favorite podcasts, and people were recommending new ones every week. People I respect were publishing thoughtful articles, and the bright side of social media, the interesting discussions of the latest in engineering, product management, and leadership thinking, were scrolling by faster than I could keep up with. 

I got to feeling pretty anxious and down on myself about how much I was missing. 

So I changed my goal. I didn’t need to read all the things. I sure couldn’t read all the things with my workload and the handful of brain cells I needed to save for things outside of work. My new goal was to learn something every week. 

I started a new note on my phone called “Weekly professional reading/listening diary.” Catchy, right? 

Then, I simply made a note of one thing I’d read or listened to that week, and ideally, one take away. The take away might be in my own words, or just a bit cribbed from the media. Like this: 

By breaking books into chapters instead of feeling guilty for not having finished the book, my perspective became “I read this chapter and here’s what I got out of it.” Instead of “I’ll never keep up with Lenny’s Podcast” it was “I picked this episode because it seemed relevant to me right now and here was my takeaway.” 

I went from anxiety and FOMO to recovering my joy of learning. I set a goal that was realistic with my life. By keeping short notes it was easier to look back and find that interesting article I wanted to share, or remind myself of a key point and where to learn more. Plus, writing a quick summary reinforced my learning as I had to identify what I found important. I’m a fairly visual thinker and learner, so this exercise really helps my digestion of podcasts, as I have to formulate something concrete after a purely audible experience.  And hey—it turned out sometimes I learned more than one thing and maybe I’d been too hard on myself. Imagine that. 

Bonus tip: A lot of podcasts have transcripts, so you can find the bit that you want to hang onto and copy it verbatim into your diary. 

Your dot release: Evaluate your learning goals vs your real-life. Set a goal you can achieve, and keep track of it. Learning something joyfully is a million times better than feeling guilty about not keeping up with the waterfall of ideas coming at us.  

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