I found that when I start to learn new things it takes some time to get used to them. Even for the thing that I had studied but paused for a while, if I return to studying it, it also takes time to restart.
The concept of maintaining brain plasticity is to maintain various skills that you need in your life by repeatedly doing it, so your skill won't become worsen.
There are so many skills such as logic, memory, creativity, art, music, language, physical movement, hand-precise control, etc. However you may not need all of them, just choose to maintain a few of them that will improve your life/occupation. Also, sometimes you may not know what that skill is called, which does not matter, just make a list of those activities, books, or subjects you want. For example:
- As I want to be a programmer and investor, I choose logic, creativity, and language skills.
- However, I just simply list the exact things I want to do including
- reading financial books: financial market fundamentals, investment, and technical analysis.
- practicing programming: read programming, practice programming.
- studying mathematics and physics.
- language: English grammar, read novel.
- news: read the financial news in Reuters, and read crypto news.
However, the real problem is how I can do such many of them repeatedly without forgetting some of them.
For the solution, the tool that helps you repeat those activities is called 'Retrospective Revision Timetables' created by Ali Abdaal, you have to create the timetable which contains the first column as the list of activities you want to do and the other columns as the time spending on each activity in each day like this:
| activities | time spending - comment (each column per day) | |||||||
| meditation | 30min - quite blur | 30min - good very calm | ||||||
| reading financial | 2hr - good | 2 hrs - good and fun | ||||||
| practicing programming | 1hr - so messy | 1 hr quite better | ||||||
| studying mathematics | 2hr - easy | 1hr - quite tired | ||||||
| studying physics | 2hr - fantastic | 1hr - fun | ||||||
| Reuters and crypto news | 1hr - reading is faster | 1hr - skimming reading | ||||||
| English grammar | 1hr - quite boring | 1hr - scramble reading | ||||||
| English Novels | 1hr - moderate | 1hr - so relax | ||||||
The advantage of this kind of table is the very high flexibility. You don't need to fix the time and worry about an interruption or what to do next in the day. You can spend time longer if you are deeply diving into the high-focus stage without worrying about the fixed time of the upcoming activity. Also, If you skip some activity, you can do it more in the next day. With this table, you don't need to be messy in trying to spread all activity equally in a week.
Then, enjoy your flexible life with more various improvements in brain plasticity.
note: for convenience, I suggest you create the table on Google Spreadsheet(this link is my template)
Thanks for this video which introduced me to this technique.
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