Effective Learning: Quantity vs. Quality

(C) D Sharon Pruitt

Many other fields, such as software development, are huge and constantly changing. As a result, it’s very important to keep your skills and knowledge up to date. However, there is far more to know than you can realistically expect to ever learn, and since new things are always emerging, it presents a moving target that you can never catch up with.

This presents a big dilemma: do you try to gain a broad knowledge, or do you accept you’ll never learn everything and make sure that what you do study you learn in detail . In essence, do you choose quantity or quality, breadth or depth?

This is a dilemma where I feel pulled in both directions at once. On the one hand, I like to thoroughly exhaust a topic and gain an in depth knowledge of it, but on the other, there’s so much I’d like to learn about that I feel it’s hard to cover it all even superficially. If I cover as much as I can, then I feel as if I’ll just forget it, whilst if I study it in depth I feel like I’ll never learn enough.

The depth-first approach, for me, means taking good notes (which I record in my knowledge base, but this is very time consuming, and as a result I cover material much more slowly, but on the other hand, once I’ve extracted the information from a source and merged it with what I already have, it will always be there as a reference.

It’s much faster for me to simply read through the material I’m studying. I can cover a much larger amount, but much less of it is committed to long term memory, and I come away feeling as though I haven’t really learnt it well enough.

On reflection, it’s clear to me that neither extreme is optimal, so the question is: what balance of depth and breadth do you choose?

In the past I’ve switched between extremes of depth and breadth because neither are satisfactory for the reasons outlined above, so now I’m committing to try and find a comfortable balance. So, I’ll spend time taking notes and some time simply reading, and I’ll start with a 50:50 ratio and adjust based on my experiences.

I’m aware that this is just my experience, so I’d be interested to know what your experiences are of the Quantity vs Quality dilemma in learning, and how you approached or resolved it in the comments section.

I look forward to reading your thoughts, but in the mean time I’ve got to face my next learning dilemma: where to start