Notes on purposeful skill maintenance/improvement/neglect | 0-fold Cross-Validation

Over the course of my life I’ve invested a lot of time and effort into the acquisition of different skills, abilities, competencies, specialized knowledge – for simplicity I will refer to all of it as “skills” in the following. Some of those skills, I would say, have even become an integral part of my identity, which isn’t unusual for a human, I guess. At my current age (sadly I’m not 17 anymore) I have accumulated a skill collection sizable enough that it needs to be managed systematically.

I need to decide: What do I want maintain? Maintain fully or partially, or merely keep-warm? Where do I want to improve? What’s the minimal maintenance dose required in each case? What new skills will I invest substantial efforts in? Which of my current skills do I choose to neglect (to balance everything out)?

Below are some directional thoughts on skill maintenance/improvement/neglect with some vague personal examples.

Skill maintenance generally requires far less time and/or effort than skill acquisition (or meaningful improvement). Therefore it makes sense to keep a skill sharp at a minimally acceptable level rather than letting it deteriorate. Of course, there are different levels of “maintain”, requiring different levels of effort. For instance, for now I merely keep-warm my music skills by playing my instruments only a few minutes per week.

Like the approach to acquiring a skill will differ between types of skills, such as motor skills, procedural skills, knowledge-based skills, etc., so will the approach to maintenance differ too. A few examples:

It seems that a memory-reliant skill will require active recall, e.g., spaced repetition (which I’ve been struggling with for almost 10 years now because it’s actually hard work to do the reviews). But, almost all non-trivial skills rely on memory to a significant degree.

Motor skill development and (later) maintenance appears to be based on regular practice of basically the same fundamental movements; for example, practicing scales on a musical instrument, or practicing the same kicks/punches over and over in a martial art.

Language skills rely primarily on regular exposure and use. Living in the US, this is something I need to actively/proactively seek out for my non-English languages. Reading books seems to work to some extent to maintain a language I already know, though it isn’t enough – at least it gives me an excuse to read fun but mediocre fiction (as in “I only read this to maintain my German/Russian!”) which I wouldn’t be reading otherwise.

A skill is made up of many component sub-skills that deteriorate at different rates. For example, fundamental hand and finger movements of playing an instrument are retained much better than individual music pieces or specific memorized chord progressions. Sometimes I may choose to maintain a specific sub-skill, and hope the best for the rest of the overall skill. For example, with the current AI wave, I chose to maintain only my competence in reviewing, rather than writing, code in certain my-non-main programming languages.

Despite point 1 above, many skills are easily restored if forgotten. There is not enough time in the day/week/month to dedicate to everything, and I need to make a conscious decision on what to neglect, eventually allowing it to atrophy. However, often skills come back quickly with a little use, even if they deteriorate quickly. A silly example: I lost the ability to type in QWERTY immediately after learning the Colemak keyboard layout; then, years later, easily relearned QWERTY in 1-2 weeks, but immediately lost the ability to type in Colemak; after using QWERTY exclusively for a year, I then easily relearned Colemak and have been maintaining both layouts in muscle memory ever since.

That’s the end of this blog post. So, obviously, a skill I should work on is writing.

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.