Today I wanted to share some key tips that can be used as guidelines for learners to organise better their learning journey and to make it more effective.

In a previous post, we have discussed the context in which the modern learner (in fact YOU) has to litteraly juggle with many elements from his professional and personal life to be able to adjust to the fast pace of our modern life and still find some time to learn.

We have also shared that the learning solutions are evolving very fast, being more social, and that learning is now available through a lot of different channels: in your organisation, with your peers, online through different media…

But to be able to benefit from these learning opportunities, you need to put yourself in the best conditions to learn.

So below is a list of tips that I have found useful to organize a learning journey, to save time, to learn better and also to save energy:

  • Set time to study regularly: this is simply the best way to be sure that you will be able to have the required time to learn and follow your program. This time can be personal or decided with your organisation, but it is very important to put in your agenda some time to learn and follow your training. In fact if you look at your habits, you may already take time to learn or access knowledge, but it is maybe not formalized.
  • Organise your contents / materials: if you engage in a program, regroup your materials so that you can re-use them and you do not waste time looking for them
  • Give yourself an engaging learning space: if you have to learn online or to attend a virtual class, it is important to have a quiet space, well organised, so that you can be in the best conditions to learn. It may sounds obvious but from experience, in online learning having a clean environment to learn is absolutely key.
  • Manage your energy level, take a break: when learning, your brain is actually engaged in many activities such as creating, memorising, organising. Ideally, taking a 10 minutes break every hour or a 5 minutes break every 30 minutes is a good way to relax and to restore your energy level.
  • Be careful with the social media distraction: I am the first one to use extensively notifications on all the devices I use everyday (laptop, smartphone, tablet…watch). Even if this is useful, when learning, I am extremely careful not to be distracted because as we saw in our modern learner analysis, you can get distracted in average every 5 minutes…which in my opinion can be even more depending on your use of social media. So my advice: focus and the world will probably not collapse if you do not answer to your last messenger chat in the next minutes.
  • Ask questions to your peers: if you have any question, of course first ask your trainer, your teacher or your referent. But if needed, I would advise you to save time by raising your question to your peers, to your colleagues, or to look for some other persons who can help. Social networks are really useful to ask to learning communities about some specific points and it will help you to get out of the questioning circle where you keep looking without the answer.
  • Last but not least, do not set up an impossible schedule, find your own pace: learning require time. Take it step by step, and don’t try to learn too much in one shot. You can feel some excitement at the beginning when starting to learn about a new topic, but if you put all your energy in the first day, you will probably get tired and bored in the second. When learning, the brain actually needs time to memorise the knowledge and you also need time to practice to fix the knowledges that you have acquired. That is why it is better to have a regular learning schedule than to force yourself to learn at a pace that is not yours.

I hope that these tips will be as useful for you as they have been for me. Of course this list is not exhaustive. Depending on your context you may have other tips to share, so feel free to comment this article or to contact me so that we can discuss it further.