We need space to learn. Space, where we can muddle through content and notes, where we can take abstract notes and refine them into clean notes, and where we can keep track of our questions and curiosities.
We need space that is forgiving and which allows us to take time and think.
During university, my learning environment consisted of pen and paper. I would start by having a collection of diverse materials like lecture notes, books and online articles. I would skim them and create a rough scope of what I needed to learn.
Once the scope was done, I would go through the materials and take abstract messy notes — notes about everything that seemed interesting and important. Once I had a stash of abstract notes, I would start to distill them into clean-shaped notes by categorizing, organizing, reorganizing and connecting insights.
Once I had my distilled notes, I would write them down on big sheets of paper. This way I would create blocks of notes — grouped and categorized.
Only recently I moved from pen and paper to digital tools. I had to play around with a lot of concepts, ideas, and templates. But none of the fancy digital learning systems was working for me. They had cool and fancy features but they just made the whole learning process too complicated and complex.
I, for example, couldn’t take abstract messy notes and think concepts through because the templates seemed so perfect that I tried to take perfect notes immediately.
Nothing seemed to work for me. So I took a step back and thought about what I was doing wrong. I had a perfectly working and simple learning environment before while using pen and paper.
So instead of trying new fancy learning environments, I tried to transform my simple pen-and-paper environment into a digital learning environment. And the result is the so-called LAMBDA environment.
This learning environment is designed to allow you to muddle through ideas, think and try to understand concepts, and tinker with notes until you are ready to distill them.
You can set it up wherever you like. I am currently using it in Notion and I’m trying to also implement it in Obsidian but you can probably also set it up in your favorite note-taking app.
The LAMBDA environment consists of 6 building blocks: Learning, Ambition, Materials, Board, Distilled Notes, and Area.