Learning by cutting, cutting by learning – lifetime education vs the will to simplify

What started as a routine technical task became, for me, a source of inspiration. How can doing less – or actually cutting down on what we do – actually help us learn or discover more?

From scheduled maintenance to a conscious purge

You don’t see it every day, but there’s stuff happening on this website behind the scenes. One of the things it’s useful to do is removing old pages and posts. This helps the website run smoother, reduces errors, and improves search engine rankings (in theory).

I set out to do this today. I’m not done yet, but I’ve already learned a lot – about the things on the page, and some things in my head.

As I looked through each page – no longer accessible from the main menu, but still “out there” if one were to look for it, I realized that the idea for this blog must have evolved countless times since I first set it up all these years ago. I had things to share, projects to brag about, ideas to communicate – which I don’t really pursue any more.

This got me thinking: how does this apply to my (or your) learning projects, professional goals – or anything that takes some time and a few attempts?

Trimming to reduce distractions

Let’s say you go back over your cooking recipe notebook at the end of the year. Among the things that really worked and brought you joy (new sweet and savoury bakes, for example), you see many pages or clippings devoted to things you’re not doing anymore (such as, for instance, barbecue ideas or heavily meaty dishes).

You decide to go through your whole recipe collection and remove the things you don’t want to cook or eat any more. As you go through them, your distractions are eliminated. The dishes you never made more than once – or those that were too fussy, or just not that good – no longer pull on your memory, or distract you as you’re flicking through your DIY cookbook. It’s easier now to find a recipe, and picking what you need takes much less time.

As you engage in this purge, you also begin to think about the “why” behind such preferences. For example, you realize your friends and family no longer hang out in the garden. Or that cooking and eating meat is no longer that popular with the folks you share food with. Or maybe you just don’t want to spend the whole evening in the kitchen when there’s another way of making sure you’re fed. All these things are valuable – and cutting your recipe book meant that you could make a conscious decision not to do some things any more.

Trimming to regain focus

There’s one more thing that can be helped by a good occasional purge – intention and clarity of purpose.

Let’s say that your folder with coding projects is getting out of hand – it takes forever to find stuff, and maybe you’re even running out of storage space. Your decision is to go through all that’s stored there, chronologically, and to archive or delete anything you’re no longer actively working on or learning.

As you open the sub-folders, you remember what it is, what language it’s coded in, what you used it for. You remember whether this project was a success or not, and what it led do.

After just a few minutes of this, you realize something. The novelty languages you picked up “just for fun” were completely forgettable and mostly unrelated to each other. You would dabble in one, make enough progress to hack a simple program together, and move on. It takes you a lot of time, looking back, to remember “what was I thinking?” or “what was that code actually supposed to do?”

There are two outliers, though – as you open each Python and R folder, you clearly see why you coded these. You begin to see how one lesson learned led to another. And, with R, you begin to remember the impact these projects actually made at work.

So you make another cup of tea and you decide to move all the Python and R resources – code, unfinished projects, manuals, coursebooks, snippets, bookmarks, everything – to another, new folder. Forget about the storage space for the moment. As soon as this folder happens, you have this strong feeling – yes, this is what I’m coding for. Yes, this is what I want my code to do. This is what is useful.

The whole rest of your coding project gets moved onto an external drive and removed from your laptop. The hard disk breathes a sigh of relief, and so do you. This trimming exercise helped you realize: these are the thing you say “yes” to, which meant removing all the ones you can’t bear to say “yes” to at the moment.

(Don’t fear) the Trimmer!

You’ve probably got enough on your plate already. Any new ambition, any attempt to revive an old passion, comes with even more decisions and more mental clutter.

So for existing and emerging projects, do not be afraid to engage in some decluttering. Cut away what is not necessary. Focus on what is clearly a priority – on the reasons you got into the whole thing in the first place – or on things which will bring the most immediate effects. Keep those, and give them the spotlight they deserve.

What will you cut next? ✂️What will you allow to thrive?🌱

(Photo by Charles 🇵🇭 on Unsplash)