The WWW Rule of Learning

Mukesh Gupta

Increasingly, I have a feeling of being overwhelmed and never in control of the time I spend on the internet. I seem to spend enormous amount of time surfing the net and not able to remember anything from the time I spent.

So, I have decided to change my internet habits to see the impact that it creates. I strongly believe that if we want to do a lot more (of something), we need to do a lot less (of something else).

So, between today and 28th February, I am going to use the following rules while browsing the net (includes that time I spend reading personal emails, newsletters, social feeds (twitter, facebook, linkedin, YouTube, Pinterest, etc), reading blogs that I follow and anything else that i end up doing while being online:

I call these the WWW rule for learning. These exact rules can be applicable if you want to learn offline as well.

• Decide what I want to learn while being online: This is the toughest question for me to answer as I am one of those people who is curious to the core and can consume content of all kinds. However, I have decided for the sake of this experiment to the following topics:
  
  
  
  • Leadership
    
  • Product Design & Development
    
  • Behavior Design
  
  
• Decide why I want to learn about these topics: The combination of these three topics will help me in achieving the goals that I have set for myself for this year.
  
• Decide whom I want to learn about these from: I already have a list of people whom I want to learn some of this from.
  
  
  
  • Leadership: Dan Rockwell, Marshall Goldsmith, John Maxwell, Gary Hamel
    
  • Product Design & Development: Tim Brown, David Kelly, Nir Eyal
    
  • Behavior Design: Charles Duhigg, BG Fogg, Heath Brothers

I will spend 30 mins in the morning and 30 mins in the evening (if required) to read and listen to content created by these people and make notes. I shall then reflect on these notes to internalize the learning.

I will write another post sometime early March to report the results of this experiments and further learnings.

What do you do to ensure that the time you spend online is productive and you move towards your goals and not end up just whiling away your time (this might also be important when done is small proportions).

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