The Journey of Learning Analysis Paralysis
In recent years I struggle with analysis paralysis around my personal and professional interests. I have an never ending and ever expanding list of interests and a feeling of loosing out.
I’ve started experimenting with learning priority setting frameworks and interest matrixes to see how I can unpack and prioritise my interests. I’m documenting the process that I went through to help anyone else who is struggling with the same “how do I decide what to spend my time on problem”.
I have too many “pulls” on my time
Digging through my memories, I’ve always struggled with broad interests and limited time. However, it seems I managed it or didn’t mind. I remember being young and complaining that time goes so slowly. “Can’t I grow up faster?” I would wonder. So I imagine that I always thought there would be more time to learn whatever I wanted in the future. I also think that before the internet and even during the early internet, the available options seemed more manageable. That was self-delusional even before the internet. It is impossible to read every meaningful book or watch every TV program before dying. The internet has made the delusion clear of being able to understand it all .
We are reminded by the minute the extreme vast knowledge that exists that we will never even be able to consume or even understand. We will only ever experience a small fraction of the world’s knowledge in our life times; and understand even less. Then with family and children, the lack of time and lack of cognitive attention share we have becomes painfully obvious. Children make the reality of time clear and make it even more difficult to cultivate any interest outside of children. There is always something I “should” be doing for family. A family is a game of tug-of-war between different interested stakeholders all trying to maximise their outcomes.
My default approach for the last many years has been twig-in-the-ocean. I keep track of various interest areas, read things that come along, explore topics that interest me, and don’t hold myself to any sort of progression on a personal or professional level. I make sure I do the best work I can at work and be the best son, father, husband that I can be at home. My “no New Year’s Resolutions” are an example. This has worked to maintain things but it does leave me feeling somewhat rudderless in my career and personal development.
Maybe it doesn’t matter?
While introspecting on this topic, I asked myself “does it even matter?”. My twig-in-the-ocean approach has worked so far and maybe I can just carry on in that manner. I eventually decided that I do want some guidance or framework for my learning for a few reasons:
I’ve reached the point with some interests that I feel that I want to develop expertise and deeper knowledge. Casual learning as-and-when things come up has worked to give me a wide range of superficial knowledge. Yet, I find that many topics I’m hungry to answer more detailed questions.
I’m more focused and serious about my career. I’ve found a company that I enjoy working with and a domain/field that I’d like to continue to focus on. This motivates me to have a more structured approach to understanding the area and upskilling myself for the company and role. “How do I maximise my value and impact in my profession/employer?”
Even today I’m making tradeoffs but I’m not aware of them. I’ve accepted or recognised that even if I’m a twig going with the flow, I’m still making trade-off decisions about what I consume and learn. However, I’m doing it unconsciously. Previously, I thought that by not focusing, I’m maximising my coverage of what is available. Yet that is false. If knowledge was fixed, being broad might make sense as I could be reasonably certain that via a “random walk” I’d cover most relevant or impactful areas. Knowledge is effectively infinite, so any random walk can become a waste of time.
It didn’t matter that much to me in the past, but now it does. I’d prefer to make conscious tradeoffs and select topics that I want to explore rather that go wide. By focusing on a few topics, I can maximise the value-potential of my learning time. Focusing more broadly only gives the illusion of coverage while sacrificing the value or impact I could have achieved through a focused interest. And I can always read widely just not with an expectation of anything other than a browse.
Now what?
Realising that I wasn't happy with how I'm approaching learning was in many ways the easiest part. I was stuck on "now what" for a year or more. I tried the micro-habits / atomic-habits approach of turning everything into small chunks and making it a daily habit. I used tools like Habitica and all kinds of different micro-learning apps like Brilliant. The tools are entertaining, but masked or delayed me facing up to a very different problem. I was trying to solve a selection problem with learning effectiveness tools. I needed to figure out a way to prioritise what I wanted to learn from a gusher of possible interests. While I continue to use many of the learning effectiveness tools, they don't help me select what I want to learn or focus on. They do help dramatically once I've decided what to learn to maximise the value from any time spent on that subject.
And in some ways I even found that many of the tools were detrimental to me figuring out what I should focus on. The tools, by design, encourage you to explore many different topics and make all of those topics interesting and easy to start, easy to access.
This is where I got stuck. I spent some time chatting with GPT about this topic and that is where GPT reassured me that this is a common problem and often seen as decision paralysis and information overload. However, the options that GPT provided were overly structured and didn't appeal. So I took out a notebook and tried to explore the topic and how I might visualise or think through a learning matrix for myself.
Taking a few hours spread over three-months of weekends, I unpacked the learning ecosystem and tried to think my way through the topic. I started out approaching it as a value question: "if I invest x time, what y value will I get out?" The logic being that I would gain more from learning where the return is highest. I quickly found that approach unsatisfying. There are many things I'm interested to learn but which I have no or very little expected value from. Likewise, there are things which likely have very high expected value but I have no interest in learning or very little interest. Some topics are very difficult to learn and some easier. Through this unpacking process, my biggest take away was just now complex and nuanced learning quantification is.
Learning is subjective
I often fall into the trap of wanting to approach any topic with an objective framework. I can then easily prioritise or make decisions that are broadly the "right" or "best" decision. However, learning interests are practically impossible to judge objectively for two main reasons: 1) the utility of any area is subject to many other influencing factors - eg: an MBA is only valuable if you value it; where and how you want to use it values it; and you actually gain some value from it. Yet we often associate value with the outcome of some learning activity (eg: get an MBA) without considering the true value is in whether we actually get value from it (eg: having the MBA gets us a higher-paying job that compensates for the opportunity cost of the time and tradeoffs made to get that MBA).
As you can see from my notebook, I spent a while exploring scoring and category matrixes where I tried to put scores to different aspects of learning to help me prioritise. I eventually found that this doesn't work as my scores and categories would change depending on the type of learning activity and my underlying bias or interests. Using the same MBA, if I value an MBA Certificate, I would score the value of a certificate as high, but if I don't value the MBA Certificate, I would score it low. It was a valuable mental process to go through, but it didn't result in any kind of system or approach which I could easily reuse across other interests or topics.
Like with many "solve this problem with a process", the process ended up being more time consuming and subjective than just making an interested decision (eg: "I just feel like this is better" rather than "I followed this long process and find this is the better option").
I kept coming back to this and eventually hit a wall with my notes and exploration. I couldn't find a model that made more sense than just "learn what you are interested in and see value in". Likewise, I couldn't find an approach to reviewing and prioritising multiple interests other than "list them out and choose the ones you value more". I left it aside over the year end holidays and then came back to it in the New Year.
Boundary Setting
Through the notes and thinking, I'd identified a wide range of interests. I'd been able to set boundaries on my interests taking a broad inventory of "everything" I'd like to focus on and am interested. I structured my learning around different categories like: Mandatory for Work or a Project/Task (will happen by default); Self Interested - "What will help me make my work better?" | "What will help my career?" | "What is meaningful for my Team, Partner or Children?" | "What is just a pure self-interest?".
For now I'm focusing on "Self Interested" and specifically the items around pure-self interest, work and career. I'll likely write separately about the other categories. I found exploring "what is meaningful for my Team" and family or kids related learning fascinating to consider within this same framework and approach.
With the boundaries set and an inventory of my interests, I was able to start exploring those categories in more depth.
What are my interests?
After taking many different approaches, I eventually ended up with a long list of different interests. In retrospect, this would have been a great place to start without worrying about how I would prioritise or approach things later on. I should have just focused on mapping out the landscape of my interests. If you are just starting this journey, I'd recommend you do this first. List them out on a sheet of paper be as broad and as specific as you can and keep it aside once you are done. I found myself adding on additional interests as the days passed. Even now I will add things to that list from time to time.
Anything can be an interest and anything is likely interesting to consider or learn about. We shouldn't put limits on considering something an interest. Instead, we have practical limits about how we spend our time, so we do limit the interests that we decide focus on. This is my chat with Poe about my interests.
And remember from earlier on, deciding not to focus on anything also means you do still decide to focus on something just that you don't do it consciously.
What will make my work better?
I identified five broad categories which will help make my work better: Company related learning - understand my company better; Industry related - understand my industry; Communications - improve how I communicate; Network - improve my relationships internally/externally; Technical - relevant technical skills specific to my job. I left it with these categories so I could then filter interests into these 'boxes' later and decide how to prioritise within.
What will help me in my career?
I could identify this as a key objective but struggled to take it further as I realised I did not have a clear career objective. I've worked through my career taking roles that were broadly interesting where I felt I could be impactful but never really saw myself working toward a specific career goal like "be a CEO". Instead, I've gone with the flow and worked to make the best impact I could within the context of the role I was in.
This process helped a lot as I was able to further unpack this item once identified and eventually conclude on a more bounded objective even if it wasn't very specific: I'm interested in roles broadly within the Digital Operations domain and where I can impact a wide range of people in a positive way within the organisation while maintaining reasonable stability and security for my family.
This is where I realised that the challenges with interests, learning, careers are helped by identifying boundaries without attempting for absolute specifics. I've failed in the past to prioritise because I tried to reach very specific conclusions about what is or isn't valuable. If I'd instead zoomed out a bit and focused more on where did I want to define limits on my interests or focus, I likely would have made better progress. Once limited, we can then explore within those boundaries.
Other Areas
As you can see, these are just a few of the categories that I identified. You may end up with very different categories. Select for categories that help you split up your interests into reasonable, actionable chunks that "feel" different to you.
Exploring Interests
This is where I got stuck again. I had a long list of interests, broad buckets and approaches I wanted to take with each bucket, and I was struggling to decide what to do next. This is where I went back to using GPT as an exploration partner.
I worked through the content I had prepared in my notes. I fed the questions and content I'd produced into GPT as questions. Then taking the questions GPT asked back and the content shared I further drilled into the topics. Through this back and forth, I eventually was able to set a clear framework to prioritise different learning interest categories and an approach for scoring a given interest in relation to the factors identified. This is a personalised and subjective approach which incorporates my interests and evolves over time.
There were a few key learnings during the exploration with GPT: (1) a matrix approach is very difficult to achieve as there are so many interdependencies and overlaps. (2) recommendations are highly subjective and dependent on underlying interests and objectives. So spending more time on self-introspection and exploration is important. There are very few topics which are inherently good to focus on as an interest. (3) a key pre-requisit is a willingness to limit yourself and acknowledgement that "I can never learn everything I want to learn."
If you would like to build on the Exploration Chat with GPT you can pick it up here.
The irony of this whole process is that even with a model, exhaustive process and the support of GPT, it didn't matter that much. The process or workflow wasn't the solution in the end.
An End and a New Start
I've ended this process with a somewhat narrow list of interests; a good list of categories and how I should approach those categories and a few reusable chats in Poe/GenAI that I can go back to whenever I have a new interest that I want to explore.
The result of the process was less impactful than the experience of going through it. Struggling to figure out what I'm interested in and how much I'm willing to trade-off to learn or focus on one thing or another - that process was the most impactful for me.
The end isn't really an end. It's a new start of looking at how I learn and prioritise my time moving forward. I encourage you to pickup a pen and start exploring what interests you and what you want to learn.