Methodological recommendations for drawing up an individual work plan for self-education

What is self-education?

The terms education and self-education are familiar to us from school. Education is distinguished by the presence of a teacher, teacher or leader who directs the process in the right direction, monitors the progress of learning and conducts checks. For example: online school. The principles of self-education are based on the complete self-control of the student. All the responsibilities of a mentor fall on his shoulders.

Do you need to educate yourself all your life? It’s not even worth explaining the importance of self-education for personal development:

• career growth;
• better quality of life;
• building proactive relationships.

The work of self-education is valued in society. Happy, purposeful people who achieve success always attract others because they understand the role of self-education in a person’s life.

Are you ready to find out your life path scenario for the near future? Do you have the ability for self-organization and self-education? Before you start engaging in your self-development , check whether you have all the listed qualities, because the success of the entire event depends on their presence:

• curiosity;
• desire to expand horizons;
• ability for systematic learning and research work;
• discipline.

If every point is about you, then quickly continue reading. You've come to the right place.

Education is not just a matter of schooling. School provides only the keys to this education. Extracurricular education is the whole life! A person must educate himself throughout his life,” Lunacharsky A.V., Soviet statesman, publicist and writer.

Target

If you want to learn, first understand why.

I want to become a professional internet marketer – that’s my goal.

I want to defend my dissertation on marketing – that’s my goal.

I want to improve my knowledge of marketing - that’s not the goal. Where exactly should I pull them? Towards a dissertation or towards practical work? The path to them is different. One will have to storm the history and philosophy of marketing and learn to conduct marketing analysis in his head. The second one needs a textbook on Yandex.Metrica and SEO.

I want to learn to read Chinese.

I want to learn how to cook haute cuisine.

I want to study postmodern philosophy.

What do you want? Be specific.

Self-education work plan

Where to start self-education? The answer is obvious: draw up an individual ready-made plan for self-education.

The self-education plan presented below is designed for a year. During this time you:

• develop memory;
• learn to read faster;
• find life goals;
• you will become more creative.

The self-education work plan is simple but effective. In just a year you can achieve amazing results.

Remember that self-education should begin with a burning desire to gain new knowledge.

Are you already burning with impatience? Go!

Developing memory

No learning is possible without a developed memory, which allows gigabytes of information to be stored in the brain. There are several techniques that improve mnemonic abilities.

1) Use your imagination.

If you need to remember information, draw it out in detail in your head, adding details. Use associative series and life experience.

Example: how to remember the address Morskoy Prospekt, building 2, apartment 1? Imagine that Morskoy Prospekt is a sea along which a sailboat in the shape of the number 2 is sailing, and on it stands a lone sailor with a 1 in his entire vest.

2) Physical activity

It has been proven that physical activity affects memory abilities.

Walking or stretching during the day will help you absorb more useful information into your head. Need to learn a large text? Walk around the room, saying the words out loud.

3) Memory training

Make it a rule to learn 5 new foreign words and one short poem a day (more can be divided over several days). Such mental training will perfectly develop your memorization abilities.

How to make a self-education plan

1

Find out why you want to learn this skill

This is a preparatory step that should be taken very seriously. We often do thoughtless things that cost a lot: both time and money. In terms of training, everything is even more critical: you can waste several months, or even years.

This is especially true if you want to learn programming. In order to start making money in this field, they say you need to study from six months to a year and a half. So if you don't feel motivated or enthusiastic enough, then maybe it's not for you.

It's all about being intrinsically motivated. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• Do you want to find a job that is more meaningful and important than your current one?
• Do you want to find a higher paying job?
• Do you want to change the world?

Even if the answers are a little pretentious, it is important that you understand that they are honest and frank.

The preparatory stage is completed. At the second stage, you will need a sheet of A4 paper or an electronic file. This is a must. You need to create a step-by-step instruction for yourself so that it constantly looms before your eyes and does not allow you to be distracted by anything unimportant.

2

Make a list of goals

This is not as simple as it might seem at first glance. You should come up with as many goals as possible so that you can compare them later and choose the most important one(s). So don’t limit yourself to something like “I want to learn how to create a website with WordPress” or “I want to learn how to knit a sweater.”

So, the list of goals is ready. How to choose the most important ones? First of all, you need to find out whether any of them are combined.

A combined goal is a goal that opens up more opportunities for you:

• Learning a new language can help you move to another country or get a better paying job.
• Learning Java will increase your income several times.

If you learn to knit a sweater, then most likely it will be an end in itself.

Therefore, ideally, you should choose goals that will significantly move you forward. This also has a positive effect on motivation.

Select one to three goals. There shouldn't be too many of them. At the same time, they can be quite ambitious, but not prohibitive.

3

Make a list of resources

You can either find everything you need on the Internet. Here are the resources you should consider:

• MOOC courses;
• books;
• magazines;
• blogs;
• educational videos;
• attending conferences and lectures;
• internship;
• volunteer work;
• trips;
• finding a mentor.

At the same time, you must understand that there is not enough time for everything. It is important to choose 3-5 main resources and focus on them. The rest is only worth pursuing if you purposefully set aside time to try something new.

4

Set key learning points

These are the points by which you can track your progress. Learning is a long process and sometimes boring, but the main difficulty is that you will not immediately get results.

In addition, an ambitious goal can easily suppress your psyche, especially at times when motivation tends to zero. Therefore, establish the key points:

• a certain number of written pages;
• website creation;
• Intermediate level in English;
• creating a phone application.

5

Set a schedule and daily routine

Learning is not something you can cram into your life and hope it will work. This is the basis, the Sun, around which all planets must revolve. Don't forget that you are studying to make your life significantly better, which means that this becomes your top priority.

Create a time frame for each goal . What are you going to do today, tomorrow, next week, in six months to achieve your goal? Make sure you master time management skills and learn how to properly manage your time.

Create a daily routine . You must change your life, because it will no longer be the same - it is naive to hope for this. A lot will change because you will be dedicating a large amount of time to learning.

So, let's repeat: you must change your daily routine, book time to learn your skill. And also set a deadline in order to keep yourself on your toes.

6

Track your progress

Tracking progress is the very process that positively affects the level of motivation. As has already been said, during the learning process you will not immediately begin to receive practical results, which means you can give up at any time. But not if you track your progress.

By tracking we primarily mean keeping a diary. You write down everything you studied and how you studied it, as well as how much time it took. Document every little detail. After a few weeks, it will be possible to draw certain conclusions based on this information. You will learn to identify trends, understand your strengths and weaknesses, bad and good habits. And finally, you will begin to draw the right conclusions, adjusting both your behavior and your self-education plan.

The English-language Internet offers a wide variety of applications that you can use to track your learning progress in order to adjust your plan if there are inaccuracies or gaps in it.

• Degreed. Learners use Degreed to quantify, track, and organize learning from any source, both formal and informal.
• Diigo. Simplify the operation of your information system and improve performance. Also adds digital marks and notes to PDFs, saves links, images and pages, and encourages collaboration and sharing with other students.
• TopTracker. This app can be used to track the time you spend in Photoshop or other digital tools (and therefore suitable for web designers and programmers).

The writer Isaac Asimov is said to have once said, “Self-education is the only education you have.” It’s hard to argue with this, because you are the one who knows best what you want to study. The main thing is to create an effective plan and strictly follow it.

We wish you good luck!

Did you like the article? Join our communities on social networks or our Telegram channel and don’t miss the release of new useful materials: TelegramVKontakteFacebook

We also recommend reading:

• Storytelling
• How to convert your abilities into money
• Rules and secrets of self-education
• A Guide to Creating a Personal Development Plan
• Best of the year. Part three
• Four steps to create a personal development plan
• Business motivation model
• Should you have a plan B?
• How planning will change your life
• Secrets of self-education
• Contingency planning

Keywords:1LLL

Structure

You can google anything. The main thing is to know what to look for.

And this is the biggest set-up. How do I know that I need to look for a list of Chinese character keys if I don’t know about the existence of these very keys?

In short, structure is curriculum. A list of topics that need to be mastered in order to gain knowledge about the subject.

It is clear that they can be mastered worse, or better. You can go deeper indefinitely, or you can just go along the tops.

But structure is needed, without it you will never understand whether you have mastered the discipline or not. You may miss an important topic or waste months studying unnecessary nonsense.

Where can I get the structure? Steal from someone who has already created it.

There are two options: find a textbook on the subject and copy the table of contents from it, or find a paid course and copy the curriculum from it.

The curriculum usually looks something like this:

Topic 1: Introduction to the subject.

Topic 2: ...

Topic 3: ...

How to find a textbook or paid course? Google it. If this is not some kind of super exotic, then a textbook or course will probably be found in the search.

Pay special attention to textbooks for beginners such as “History of Philosophy in 2 Hours.” They give a very good idea of ​​where to move next.

You may have to Google it in English, because you won’t find information on the RuNet. Be sure to look for information in English, even if you don’t speak it well: Google Translator has been working very well lately. You can understand the meaning of even very complex materials.

Built-in translators in the browser are very convenient. They themselves offer to translate the contents of the page in a foreign language. Such translators are available in Google Chrome and Yandex Browser. There is no particular difference in the quality of translation, although different services are used.

Be sure to tell Google that you want to see results in English, otherwise it will give preference to Russian-language results even if you search in English. This is done like this:

Go to Google home and go to your account

Go to the “Account Settings” section and select “Language and input methods”

Go to the "Language" section

Click "Add Language" and select English from the list. You will also be asked to select a country from the list. It does not matter. You can leave Germany, which comes first, or choose the USA

Information

You will find most of the information on Google. Collect a selection of materials. Just search for the name of each topic and save the links to bookmarks or in a separate file.

Where else to look.

• In social networks. Search for a hashtag with the name of your specialty. For example: #Chinese or #Chinese. Search on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and VKontakte. Even if you don’t find useful educational materials there, you may find like-minded people, which is also valuable. Especially if you are learning a foreign language.
• On YouTube. The rules are the same. Search in both Russian and English.
• On thematic forums. They still exist and you can almost always find deposits of useful information and collections of materials on the topic.
• On the websites of online universities. There are too many to list, but you can often find free or low-cost courses on the topic. Start with Coursera - this site is the largest and has courses on just about everything under the sun.
• Once again on VKontakte. There is a little-known functionality - document search. If you want a book but can't find it, enter its title there. There is a high probability that the book will be found.

Search for documents on VKontakte

Exception. About personal experience

The only information that cannot be found on the Internet is the personal experience of the speaker.

It makes sense to learn from people who have been doing something for many years, have achieved success, understood something about it and now want to share their knowledge.

Typically, personal experience is very important in creative professions, where success can be achieved in different ways: in design, marketing, business, painting, cooking.

Motivation

Paid courses are great motivation. If you give your entire salary for them, then you will go at any cost.

And there is no violence in self-education. You will not be expelled for being late or not attending. No score will be deducted for an incorrect answer. They won't call you a loser for getting a bad grade. This is good from the point of view of universal human values, but it is very discouraging.

There is a stupid but effective way to boost your motivation a little. Ask yourself questions from the list every day.

• Did I learn something today? How long did it take? What was done?
• What did I learn?
• Is there progress?
• Can you apply this knowledge in the next couple of days?
• Did I put something into practice today?
• What are the curriculum for tomorrow?

Just really ask, and don’t think that it would be nice to think about it, but you can do it tomorrow. It is forbidden. Do it today.

The article A few words about motivation, or How to overcome laziness may also help you.

We teach

This is Petya.
Petya collected a selection of materials on the topic, but did not read it. A very stupid thing to do. Don't be like Petya. No, in reality, everyone usually merges at this stage. They collect a selection and then forget and don’t read it.

I talk about motivation below, but for now there are some useful things for those who still decide to study:

The Learning How to Learn course is the most famous and useful course for those who study. Talks about useful learning techniques and helps you better structure and remember information.

Articles:

• How to learn to understand and remember information. A little about fragmentation
• What's stopping you from studying?
• How to remember numbers, dates and formulas. Mnemonics techniques

Lifehack. The Internet is full of useless, stupid and simply unnecessary articles. In order not to waste extra time reading waste paper, first look through the material diagonally to assess whether it really contains useful information or is just empty chatter.

Where to begin?

I have already talked in the article “What is self-education and how to create an individual plan” about all sorts of nuances, types and advantages, now I want to show you with an example that it is easy and effective. I have been interested in learning English for a long time, so I will offer a ready-made step-by-step plan as an example, as a sample, and you can already apply it in any area that attracts or is vitally necessary.

So where did I start? Namely, from clarifying the motive, to make sure that my goal is significant to me, and I will not give up on it at the first difficulties. To do this, you need to answer a number of questions:

1. What do I want to achieve? Thanks to this question, we create the boundaries of what we want, that is, our goal becomes clearer and more realistic. I want to speak English perfectly.
2. Where am I currently? That is, mentally look back, because before we go somewhere, we must first understand where we are coming from, right? In the case of development, we consider the current situation, that is, strengths and weaknesses. For example, you speak English at an intermediate level, your vocabulary is about 5 thousand words, but you have problems with grammar, your knowledge of tenses is at an elementary level.
3. What should you pay attention to? Here we set priorities and formulate tasks. I will focus on grammar, it is a priority for me, simultaneously studying unfamiliar words, and only then will I pay attention to correct pronunciation and the ability to distinguish speech by ear.

This is what my table looks like

Assessment of knowledge

This is the biggest problem with self-learning. There is no way to objectively and independently evaluate your knowledge. How cool are you? What works and what doesn't? How much better or worse are you than others? Are you not lying to yourself?

Quizzes and tests usually help assess knowledge. Moreover, the best thing is group ones - this is when you see your result in the column of other students’ results. You scored 58 points out of 100. 48 people out of 80 were better than you. Very offensive, but honest and objective.

You can swear at exams and tests as many times as you like, but nothing better has yet been invented. Treat them calmly. They don't exist to destroy your self-esteem forever. The goal is to calmly evaluate what you have understood and what you have not understood from the material you have studied.

The easiest way to test yourself is in school and academic disciplines. Find a manual on the topic and take the test.

But with non-academic disciplines, like SMM, it’s more difficult. Such disciplines can only be tested in practice.

The only option is to try to find a specialist on the Internet and ask him to evaluate your work. It is not a fact that he will agree, but it is quite possible. But be prepared to be ignored or sent away. That is life.