<aside> 🧱 Shaping is part of the Lean Learning Method and is supposed to help you "plan" intentionally what you want to learn. The intentional plan — shaped learning — will help you be more flexible, deliberate, and joyful during your learning sessions.
Flexible because your plan — shaped learning — is abstract enough and not rigorous like typical online courses.
Deliberate because you define a learning project in which you can apply newly learned skills.
Joyful because you made a plan that is meaningful to you.
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How do you plan your learning? And how does it work out for you? Do you have enough time or do you feel like being behind with learning after a couple of days? Do you have enough time to practice or are you just trying to cram everything into your brain?
The problem with typical learning plans is that we often make a rigorous plan, we don’t include any practices or learning projects, we don’t think about why we want or have to learn.
The rigorous plan doesn’t account for unknowns like gaps in understanding, questions that might appear, or curiosities you might come across. Dealing with unknowns takes time. But we ignore them because we just don’t have enough time. This makes learning inflexible.
The missing practice or learning project doesn’t allow you to use your new skills or knowledge. This makes learning un-deliberate.
Because you never defined the reason for your learning, you run into the risk of either losing motivation or getting distracted from your actual learning.
In the end, planning results in being frustrated and not enjoying learning.
But there might be an alternative to planning. An alternative that might make learning deliberate, intentional, and joyful again. This alternative to traditional planning is to shape your learning like Basecamp,— a software company — which shapes their projects with the Shape Up method by Ryan Singer.
I tried to apply some of Basecamp’s shaping principles to learning. Instead of shaping projects, we can try to shape learning. This might remove some of the chaos, distraction, and frustration around learning by giving it more structure. And thus, your learning can be shaped into meaningful bits.
The Lean Learning shaping process uses the C.R.I.S.P. method.
First, you choose (C) what you want to learn. Define what you want to learn and name it. Be specific. For example, I want to learn the basics of Vue.js — a programming language.
Now, with your chosen goal in mind, it is time to collect some resources (R). Go look and find materials that seem promising and helpful. This can be tutorials, online courses, articles, books, documentations. Whatever seems helpful to achieve your learning goal. Just collect them for now. Even if you don’t end up using them.