Here is How You Can Build Your Personal Learning Routine

Personal Learning Routine

Learning is one of the crucial things for you as an entrepreneur in increasing as a first your own business potential energy and then the overall business potential energy of your company. So you need a personal learning routine.

Personal learning is important because you play one of the biggest roles in creating success for your small business.

Probably before ten years or more, there was not a need to build learning routine, because in that time you were surrounded only with few learning sources that you could use it as a part of entrepreneurial learning. But, today it is much different. You have too many possibilities that easily can bring you in a position of information overload and learning instead of putting you forward to bring you back.

Let’s take a look at what you can do this weekend as a part of this weekend project.

Personal Learning Routine Step #1: Create your personal learning strategy.

Implementing personal learning process in your entrepreneurial career will be much easier if you use a strategic approach.

Your strategy as a first will need to tell you what are the most important things for which you will need to learn and improve your knowledge and skills. You can’t become an expert on everything, because it is not possible. If you put all your efforts to become expert for everything, you will quickly start losing your focus and instead of building really exceptional entrepreneurial knowledge and skills you will become a mediocre person only good about everything.

The second thing that your personal learning strategy will need to include is how you can learn the best. Are you better learning when you read something, or listening audio, or watching a video, or doing something…

There are many tactics for you to learn something, but you will need to know tactics that are the best fit for you.

The third thing that your personal learning strategy will need to include is possible sources about your learning materials. Because your strategy already has covered what you need to learn, and how you can learn, now you can easily build several sources of learning materials that you can use in your personal learning process.

Personal Learning Routine Step #2: Build your own learning process.

The second step is to start building your own learning process. Now, you have a strategy and it is time to make a process that will consistently support you in your learning efforts.

When you build your process, think in a wider view, because learning is not only collecting information for you. Learning is more about the implementation of what you have already have learned and making standards for your future action steps.

Personal Learning Routine Step #3: Build your own rituals when you are learning.

personal learning routine - what is learning

Learning as I already said is a continuous process, that can be viewed as a small part of your overall continuous improvement process in your company. Because of that, you will need to standardize it and embed the entire process through rituals in a form of your daily activity.

For example, schedule one hour daily for reading a book or writing a diary, or watch educational videos…

Maybe when you read a book you will put notes in the book, or you can prepare a separate document on your computer with the most important notes, or you’ll put notes in your diary, or you will create a mind map …

It is good to have and use rituals.

For example, with a few books when I read I made mind maps, these maps are still useful for me because they are not requiring too much time to find the main recommendations from the books that I have read before several years.

Another example that I use today, but it is limited to Kindle versions of books is that when I read the book I am using the highlighting feature. This feature automatically records the highlights to my Amazon account. When I finish reading the book, simply I go to my Amazon account and transfer all highlights and my personal notes from the book to Evernote. Now I am using DevonThink Pro. So, all the important stuff that I want to remember and use in the future can be searched and always in my hand when I need it.

Personal Learning Routine Step #4: Learn from other’s mistakes, but implement what you have learned.

It is good to learn from the mistakes of other people. But, still, I think that this way of learning things is not something that will guarantee that you have learned something. Surely, you will remember the mistakes that others have made. But, how long you will know that mistakes? A week, a month, a year, five years …?

How much longer will be the time period, it is more likely that you will forget what you have learned. This is true especially if you don’t try to implement that in your own business.

Whenever you learn something from other people’s experience, try to implement the following steps:

  • Discover what was the goals a person who made a mistake have wanted to achieve.
  • Define the process that the person who made a mistake was implemented to achieve those goals.
  • Define all mistakes in the process that drove to the failure of achieving goals.
  • Design your own process where mistakes will be eliminated.
  • Start with the implementation of your own process.
  • Monitor and measure the results of implementation.
  • Always work on the improvement of the process.

Personal Learning Routine Step #5: Try to increase the speed of one cycle of your learning process.

Today, you have all the tools that you will need to increase the speed of your learning process. You can use audio books instead of reading books where you can easily set up an increased speed of audio. Also, you can increase the speed of video presentations from which you want to learn something. You can simply exercise to improve the speed of learning.

Question: What are the best tactics that you are using to improve your learning efforts?