Leveraging the Learning Process

Process improvements are “a gift that keeps on giving.” Improving an event has a one-time payback. Improving a process can yield lifetime benefits.

Let’s take a personal example: Reading. Many of us have taken an Evelyn Wood speed-reading course or a knockoff. It’s about as effective as a diet. You put the weight back on; you lapse back into your old, plodding reading style.

From the balcony, we see readers who read linearly and always at the same speed. They have no strategy for approaching their reading, and generally they don’t find it a whole lot of fun.

The meta-learning approach for improving professional reading will shave 20% off your reading time, and it will stick because it’s not in conflict with your natural proclivities. Our reading process improvement plan would incorporate:

1. Skim before reading and decide “what’s in it for me.”
2. Purposeful reading. Set your expectations before charging into the text.
3. Adopt the attitude of Indiana Jones – you’re out for discovery, you may find treasure, and this is going to be fun.
4. Consciously vary your approach and speed according to your desired outcome.
5. Highlight text as you go. This challenges your mind to note what’s important.
6. Reflect on what you’d read and decide whether to include it in your personal knowledgebase. If it’s important to remember, share the main ideas with someone else.

It takes two or three hours to master these approaches. Their benefits are self-reinforcing. Here’s the trade-off: Is it worth the time to do this, as opposed to items on your mind’s front burners?

Here’s the math.

1. Like most knowledge workers, I read articles, memoranda, email, and so forth two hours a day. Make it ten hours a week, fifty weeks a year, so we’re talking 500 hours a year.
   
   
2. Improving your reading process enables you to read 20% faster, a saving of 100 hours a year. That’s two and a half weeks.
   
   
3. Would you spend a few hours to double your annual vacation time? Duh.

The Meta-Learning Lab helps knowledge workers achieve the enormous payback of process improvements in all areas of their work.

The Balcony: What is Meta-Learning?

Looking at the Learning Process

Improving the Learning Process

Leveraging the Learning Process

Meta-Learning Lab Helps Corporations

Engaging the Meta-Learning Lab