For the person with fourteen browser tabs open, 3 half-finished courses, 6 books dog-eared, and no idea where any of their notes are.
If you’re someone who teaches yourself things, you already know the particular chaos that comes with it.
You’re not in a classroom with a syllabus telling you what to read next and when to take notes and where to file everything. You’re following your own curiosity, which is wonderful! And motivating! And genuinely one of the best ways to learn! But, it also means you’re making all of the organizational decisions yourself, often in the middle of trying to absorb new information, which is exactly the wrong moment to be figuring out where to put it.
The result tends to look something like this: notes scattered across three different apps, highlights in a Kindle you haven’t touched in months, a YouTube watch later playlist that’s hundreds of videos long, a Notion page you started for a specific course then abandoned, etc. Somewhere, buried deep in all of that mess, there’s genuinely valuable ideas and knowledge – that now you can’t find when you need.
Self learning is a superpower. A chaotic system is the thing standing between you and actually being able to use what you know. Here’s how to fix that – or at least how I fixed that for myself.
The real problem with how most autodidacts manage their learning
Let’s just get this out of the way – the issue isn’t that you’re learning from too many sources. Learning across books, courses, videos, podcasts, etc, is one of the advantages of being a self-directed learner. You’re not locked into a curriculum or only hearing one teacher’s perspective.
The issue is that each of those sources tend to produce knowledge that lives in a different place and a different format, with little to no connection between them. Book notes might live in your Kindle or e-reader, course notes might live in a physical notebook or long forgotten Google Doc. Your articles are saved in a read-later app you never get back to. (Guilty!)
None of these pieces of learning talk to each other. You can’t search across them. You can’t see the connections between what you read last month and what you’re watching right now. You can’t look at your learning as a whole and understand where you’ve been, where you are, and where you want to go next.
What a proper personal curriculum needs to do
Before we get into how to build it, it helps to be clear on what you’re actually building for. A system for self-directed learners needs to do a few specific things:
- It needs to capture resources before they disappear. The article you found at 11pm, the book recommendation your friend sent you that you swear you’ll get to later, the course you bought and keep forgetting you did; these need to go somewhere immediately, or they’re as good as gone.
- It needs to track what’s in progress and what’s waiting. At any given moment, a dedicated learner has a list of what they’re focusing on and an even longer list of what they want to get to one day. Having visibility over both means you can make intentional choices over what to focus on, rather than just defaulting to whatever you had open last.
- It needs to hold your notes and takeaways in a searchable, organized way. I know, I know, nothing beats the feeling of writing in your favourite notebook; but when it comes to actually looking back at your notes, notebooks can be very ineffective for this (unless you have a strict organizational system within your notebooks. In which case, props to you, I could never!). Which is why it helps to digitize your notes, or cut out the middle man and take them digitally to start. Plus, digitally, you can connect the notes directly to the sources they relate to.
- It needs to help you see the bigger picture of your learning. What subjects have you been doing deep dives into? What areas do you keep saying you’ll get to, but never actually devote time to? What do you want to learn next, and why?
- And, it needs to be simple enough that maintaining it doesn’t become a project in itself. The system needs to help the learning, not create a whole new thing to learn.
Why Notion might be the right tool for this
I might be a bit biased, given that I literally run a Notion-themed blog over here, but hear me out. There are tons of note-taking and organizational tools out there, believe me I’ve tried them, but in my opinion, only Notion has everything in the one place with everything connected.
The database feature means your books, courses, videos and articles can all live in the same place, connected to each other, organized by status, subject, format – whatever suits you best. You can filter and view these databases in whatever way you want, be that a Kanban board or a calendar or a simple table. That kind of flexibility is nearly impossible to recreate in a simple notes app or Google Docs!
The linked structure means your notes can reference each other. An idea you encountered in a book can be connected to the course where you went deeper on it, which can be connected to the article that challenged your view on it. This is how knowledge actually builds; not in isolated pockets, but in a web of connections.
And the all-in-one nature of Notion means you’re not spending precious time and brainpower flicking from one app to the next when you move from planning your learning to actually taking notes to reviewing what you’ve learned. It’s all in the one workspace!
There is something I have to warn you about, though; setting up a Notion learning hub from scratch is a genuine project. Working out the right database structure, the right properties, what needs to be tracked vs what’s just filler, what views work best for you – it can be overwhelming, and that’s before you’ve even gone out and looked for material to put in the thing.
It’s a good thing you’re here, isn’t it?
Starting with a template built exactly for this
The Personal Learning Notion Template in the Notique Etsy shop was built specifically for autodidacts (you, probably, since you’re reading this) who want an organized home for everything they’re learning, without spending weeks building a system from scratch.
It includes:
- A resource library where books, courses, videos, podcasts, articles, etc all live in one database, trackable by status, subject, format and priority.
- A notes and takeaways system connected to your resource library, so your insights are always linked back to where they came from.
- A subject tracker so you can see your areas of focus and how your learning is developing across them.
- And a learning queue so all those recommendations and “what to learn someday” ideas have somewhere to live until you’re ready for them.
Everything is already connected! You duplicate it into your Notion workspace and start filling it in. The structural decisions are already made, so you can spend more time and energy learning rather than organizing.
If you’ve been trying to wrangle your self-directed learning into some kind of coherent system and not quite getting there, this is the starting point that removes the blank page problem entirely.
How to actually use your learning system (so it doesn’t end up another abandoned Notion page)
Having the right system is only useful if you use it consistently, otherwise it’s not a system. Here’s what makes the difference between a learning workspace that becomes part of your practice and one that gets opened twice and then forgotten about:
- Add resources the moment you find them, not later! “Later” is where good intentions go to disappear. When you come across something you want to read, watch or study, add it to your database immediately. That thirty second entry could be the thing that saves it from being lost to cyberspace forever.
- Take notes while you learn, not after. Trying to reconstruct what you got from a book a week after you finished it is much harder than capturing thoughts as they arise while you read. Even rough notes made in the moment are more valuable than the “perfect” polished notes you keep telling yourself you’ll get to.
- Do a brief weekly review. Ten minutes once a week to look at what you’ve been learning, mark things as complete, move things from your queue to active, and note anything you want to follow up on. This tiny habit is what keeps your system current and keeps you making intentional choices about your learning rather than just drifting towards whatever’s easiest.
- Connect ideas deliberately. When you notice that something you’re learning relates to something else, link it! This is where the real value of the system shows up, and over time you start to see patterns and relationships in your knowledge that you wouldn’t have noticed if everything was separated.
Your knowledge deserves a home that reflects how hard you worked to acquire it
Self-directed learning takes real effort, believe me, I know! Finding the resources, showing up consistently, actually absorbing and understanding something rather than just consuming it passively; that’s all work, and it gives you something genuinely valuable.
The frustrating thing about a chaotic learning system is that it can make a lot of that effort invisible, even to yourself. You’ve learned a lot! You have more knowledge and more capability than you realize. But if it’s scattered across a dozen different places, it can be hard to see it that way.
An organized learning system makes your knowledge feel real. You can look at your resource library and see the subjects you’ve gone deep into, the courses you’ve completed, and the books that shifted how you think. That matters! It shows you who you’re becoming through everything you’ve chosen to learn.
You’re already putting in the effort, now you deserve a system that does it justice. Wishing you the best in your journey! 🌸
Ready to give your learning a proper home? The Personal Learning Notion Template has everything set up and ready to go, so you can stop planning out your system and start actually learning! →
