Caffeinated Coder

I’ve been using ReSharper for over a year, but it recently occurred to me that I’m still only using about 1/4 of the functionality.

Although there are a plethora of cool, productivity-enhancing features in ReSharper, there definitely aren’t a year’s worth of things to learn. In fact, I’m pretty sure that I picked up most of my current repetoire of hotkey knowledge within the first week. Somehow I became complacent soon afterwards and stopped learning new features even though I was thrilled with the ones I had already acquired.

It reminds me of the The Expert Mind, a scientific paper that I wrote about last year in my post Where Do Experts Come From?. According to the authors of that paper, novices and experts start out learning at the same pace, but novices loose interest as soon as the novelty wears off while experts manage to sustain that same pace of learning long afterwards.

I decided that if I ever wanted to shed my novice status when it comes to this tool and become a ReSharper Jedi, then I had to take some strategic steps to restart the learning process.

Here’s what I did:

1. Favorite Features List: I made a list of all of the features that I am fluent with, which I define as the ones I use on a daily basis without having to pause to remember the hotkey. Although not as critical as the other steps, I still found this activity to be helpful in allowing me to solidify existing knowledge as well as reinforce good habits. I’m also hoping to use this list in my future efforts to convince several stubborn co-workers to start using this tool, which many have not yet installed even though we all have licenses.
2. Practice List: Next I made a list of all of the features that I’ve tried and found helpful but don’t use very often or very effectively. This is usually because I either habitually forget about the feature or else don’t have the hotkey combination memorized and therefore have to fumble around with the menu system in order to use it.
3. Try List: Finally I created a list of features that I haven’t tried yet. I populated this list by looking through the ReSharper menu system, going through the embedded tips, and rereading the posts in Joe White’s 31 days of R# series.
4. Daily Review of Try and Practice List: Next I placed these lists in a OneNote notebook (any simple text editor will work) and pulled it up to review several times a day in order to remind myself of potential new features to try and use.
5. List Item Promotion: Once I tried a new feature for the first time, I moved it to the Practice list. As soon as I noticed myself using a feature fluently, I moved it to the favorites list. This simple act of promoting features from one list to the next was not only useful in helping to keep me organized and establish concrete goals, but it also proved to be motivating since it gave me a sense of accomplishment every time I was able to move an item.

Although I’m sure that this simple technique that I thought up certainly played a role in restarting the learning process, I think that my sudden awareness of the psychological ‘novice’ pattern that I fell victim to played an even more critical role.

Once I move the last ReSharper feature from the Practice list, I plan to apply this same approach to other tools, new language features, and uncharted API.

What have you done to break out of a learning rut?

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