

Ask HN: How do you manage your personal development? - mjlee

How are you keeping track of the skills you want to develop?  How are you maintaining skills you don&#x27;t get to use often?  Personally I have a MoinMoin wiki set up in a Dropbox folder.  I try things in VMWare on my laptop as I don&#x27;t have reliable internet access at the moment.
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MichaelCrawford
Hey that sounds like a good idea. Using a personal wiki I mean - that had not
occurred to me.

A common problem I face, especially so because I am self-employed, is that at
any moment there are many things I could do to better myself. Which one do I
choose? I don't always make the best choices. Often I do nothing at all
because I am overwhelmed.

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_mpf
Thats more a wetware problem, than a software :)

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MichaelCrawford
A friend of mine just today bought me a pack of 3 by 5 notecards and a ball
point pen.

It's not like I don't know what my priorities are, but it's intractible to
hold on to them all mentally. Writing them down means that I can, temporarily,
forget some of them.

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_mpf
That's great Michael. If that's any help for you:

1\. i'm using task/todo list for such things.

2\. In David Allen's book "Getting Things Done" there is whole chapter or more
which is i think about the problem you metioned (he names this "open loops" \-
problems you must solve but don't want to have it constantly in your mind but
manage them in some way using external memory to not clutter mind and not
forget them).

Probably you heard about this book because it's popular but i think it's worth
mentioning, it's the case when popularity comes with reason before not after
;)

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MichaelCrawford
I've read Allen's book, but it was many years ago. I'll read it again soon.

There's more I'd like to say, but I'd like to get something done tonight. :-D

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_mpf
URL aggregators online/offline are also good for keeping resources in one
place, you can use tags for fast search.

It's imporant to find one which can export data to "human format" to convert
it later fe. when service is going to be shutdown or you need other functions.

