One habit, that changed the way I learn things

READING 📖 and WRITING ✍️

In this fast-paced tech world, being relevant and staying up to date in the Software Industry is a necessity.

I have been in the software industry ( As a Quality Engineer ) for around 11 years and have seen the growth rate in technology, learning and job profiles. It is the time of the hour, that we keep ourselves relevant by continuously learning, sharing, and applying tech.

It is easier said than done.

At times it becomes overwhelming due to the continuous feed of information, scattered around various topics and technologies. Platforms like LinkedIn, Telegram, Discord and similar make it even more tougher, as there are always debates, discussions and promotions from different schools of thought. In a way, it is good to see them but we need to know how much to consume and how to filter out redundant and irrelevant information.

I realised that learning is a continuous process and it needs a structured approach and a purpose. Else what we learn today can be easily forgotten.

Below are some of the practices that I tried to bring recently to keep myself on track and build good habits that will have a good impact.

1. Prepared a roadmap for broader topics and created small tasks for each topic

2. Prioritized each task based on its need

3. Picked up only a few tasks to start with and made a habit of dedicating time to them every day or every week

   1. Though I failed initially leaving all tasks as it is and not having progress at all.

   2. But I am still in the process of improving gradually

4. When I start working on a task, I start doing 2 things

   1. Learn from official sites, articles, and books ( READING Habit )

   2. Make notes out of it ( WRITING Habit )

   3. Additionally, I tried sharing my learnings with others or implementing them at work or in life. ( Though not everything can be implemented or shared )

Everything mentioned so far looked good on paper but was hard to stick to it. The obvious reason was to develop consistency and habit.

Here comes the Remote Indian community which I am a part of and they started an initiative called 6 AM Club. This sounded like another motivational act but I wanted to give it a try and joined them.

Most of my learnings in my career were due to accountability. I try to find someone accountable and it becomes easier for me to commit and make good progress.

This 6 AM club from Remote Indian:

• Like-minded folks join a Zoom call at 6 AM till 7.30 or 8 AM every weekday.

• Abhishek Bose who is the moderator, hosts the Zoom meeting with nice focused background music ( From brain.fm ) and everyone silently ticks off their tasks.

• Early morning time is 100% distraction-free and chances of being consistent are very high.

• I developed a good habit of waking up early, also going to bed early.

• I already had my tasks ready and I picked up the most boring, difficult tasks for this time slot, such as reading books, articles, whitepapers, writing blogs, notes etc.

• This became a productive hour, also giving me a feeling of achievement in the first hour of the day.

My testimonial has been posted by the Remote Indian community here.
If you want to join the club, here is the link.

The outcome so far:

• Consistency in reading and writing, this blog itself is another example of my writing habit.

• Distraction-free productive hour.

• Since I developed reading, I ended up reading amazing books, articles and whitepapers, which in general I would have not read as they are long or need lots of focus time. Some of them are:

  • https://martinfowler.com/articles/practical-test-pyramid.html

  • https://martinfowler.com/articles/newMethodology.html

  • https://martinfowler.com/architecture/

  • https://kentcdodds.com/blog/the-testing-trophy-and-testing-classifications

  • https://www.selenium.dev/documentation/test_practices/design_strategies/

  • https://www.selenium.dev/documentation/test_practices/testing_types/

  • https://arpitbhayani.me/papershelf ( To Read )

• Apart from these, I started reading the official documentation for tools and libraries and found that they contain in-depth information compared to filtered ones that are written by others in the blog.

• So deep diving into important tools and technologies from official resources is the most impactful way for me.

I will try to keep this consistency and see what more it brings.