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Learning More
Than One Thing at
a Time?
The reasons for this are not entirely understood yet. One of
the reasons might be because of memory consolidation.
That cramming too many repetitions of an concept in a
single studying session may only result in a single act of
consolidation, so the extra repetitions are wasteful. Another
reason might be because learning is stronger when youre
switching frames or contextshaving to boot the
information, so to speak, makes the memory more robust
than thinking about it when youve just been thinking about
it recently.
The simple case for parallel learning goals is that you might
learn more efficiently if you spread your studying out and
switch between learning tasks.
However, thats not the only way to learn things and there
are other structures that also work. A habitual structure
works by making the studying activity a habitsomething
you do regularly every week consistently. With a habitual
structure you can manage a lot more learning goals in
parallel.
Conclusion
Unfortunately I cant offer an easy conclusion that learning
should always be done with focus or in parallel. Instead, I
think these are both valid strategies which work well in
different cases for different goals.
Think about what youre trying to learn right now. Are you
trying to learn something important that is difficult enough
to require focus? Try a project. Or are you trying to learn
multiple things out of interest but often forget to work on
them? Try establishing them as habits. Of course some
things will inevitably just be learned casually, and perhaps
thats how they should remain!