The Data Learning Diary: Tracking Your Weekly Learning Progress
Why checking your learning at the end of the week helps you advance in projects
When we think about writing we might believe that we have an inherent obligation of writing something ground breaking, a scientific article, an encyclopedia, etc.
But the reality is simpler.
Writing is a powerful tool that you can use pretty much for any purpose: writing short stories, listing things to remember them, or journaling, for example.
One of my favorite uses besides writing for this newsletter and sharing content online is: tracking my weekly knowledge.
A writing use case I’m sure will help you advance your learning progress, your projects, and your career in general.
Using a Paper and Digital Notebook
Not so long ago, when I started in this world of technology, especially in data science, in my very first day of work, I was handed a laptop along with a small notebook and a pen. I immediately thought: “What’s the use of this? I’ll have everything inside my IDE, I don’t think I’ll forget anything.”
Boy, I was wrong.
At the same time I was advancing through projects and meetings, that notebook saved my life. It helped me:
Organize my thoughts before presenting results in a meeting.
Summarize key ideas from daily standup and sprints.
Highlight key results and suggestions from my peers.
Note down next steps.
And one of my favorites: annotate new things to learn.
The importance of that notebook (and its content) grew more and more in my daily workflow.
Soon, I felt I needed a little “upgrade”, so I decided to expand my note taking to a digital format.
I chose Notion as my main notes storage. This helped me organized my notes in simple categories:
Work Projects: meeting summaries, progress, next steps, deadlines, pain points.
Personal Projects
Learning (courses, new technologies, tools, etc.)
Newsletter posts ideas
Notes about books (technical and non-technical)
This way, every note was allocated in a specific category, helping me organize the mess I was accumulating in the physical notebook.
I then realized something: I was noting down things I learned and implemented during the week, but wasn’t actually reflecting about them nor documenting them with detail.
Here, documenting the process you go through when learning something new is important. It helps you be aware of what you’re putting into practice, the failed experiments, and the final success.
That’s why I created a specific category in my notes:
The Data Learning Diary
I fill this diary (a basic separate page in Notion) with the things I’ve learnt through the week.
What I do in 3 steps:
I see something I want to learn → note down the topic
Go over the topic and use the Feynman technique by writing a summary in simple words to see if I understood → note down that summary (depending on the case I later ask Claude or ChatGPT to help me understand difficult concepts).
If it’s relevant to the project, apply that knowledge immediately → document every single step in the way: the goal of the project, first implementation, failed experiments, what worked, what didn't.
I do this daily, so at the end of the week I have a list of all the things I've been going over.
This is an example of last week.
On Friday, I did the exercise of going over each of the things I learned from Monday to Friday. Checking what I documented and rereading it to recall it.
This took me about 20-30 minutes at the end of the day, and I felt it was a powerful way of fixing that knowledge.
Giving room for your mind to process everything it went through the week, may feel overwhelming at first, but it helps your brain settle the information you’ve been learning.
Creating your own note taking methodology can make wonders in the long term. It can make a compound effect and help you advance in areas you feel stuck, understand concepts better, apply them or discard them for others that might be more suitable for your project. It’s your choice.
Key Takeaways
Whether you’re advancing on your data career or you’re more experienced, writing down and organizing your notes will help you retain the daily information better.
Choose any tool you want, physical or digital, the important is to have one you feel comfortable with.
Make the effort of writing things daily, just a few comprehensive lines of what you’ve learnt that day and put aside some minutes at the end of the week to go over it.
Ask AI to help you ease the way, be it summarizing, understanding, or reframing ideas.
You’ll see the big picture at the end of the week and adjust your methodology for a next occasion.
Hope this idea is valuable to you, and if you have any suggestions on what other note-taking methods are helpful, feel free to comment!
See you next time,
Ricardo.