Financial independence is the goal.

1. Open a Lifetime S&S ISA for the 17/18 tax year.

2. Put £4000 into a Lifetime S&S ISA for the 17/18 tax year.

3. Overpay my mortgage by £1000 by the end of 2017.

4. Start an Emergencies Fund.

5. Put at least £1000 into the Emergencies Fund by the end of 2017.

6. Write plan to boost income from side hustles.

7. Follow plan to boost income from side hustles.

8. Continue to monitor and evaluate income from main job.

1. On the backburner til Q2.

2. For Q2.

3. £610 paid in, so 61% met.

4. Started.

5. £250 paid in. So 25% met.

6. Haven't done this :$

7. I have been slightly more diligent with certain hustles, but not with others :(

By Olga Khazan, The Atlantic, March 16, 2017

Quick, what’s the capital of Australia? No Googling! (And no points if you’re Australian–that means the information is more meaningful to you, which means you’re more likely to know it). Did you get it? Or are you sure you learned it at some point, but forgot right around the time that you forgot how the Krebs cycle works? In his new book, Learn Better, author and education researcher Ulrich Boser digs into the neuroscience of learning and shows why it’s so hard to remember facts like that one. Boser explains why some of the most common ways we try to memorize information are actually totally ineffective, and he reveals what to do instead.

Because we’re all getting dumber in the age of Google, I interviewed Boser recently about what people can do to boost their memories and skill sets, even if they’re long past flash-card age. An edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Olga Khazan: What does it mean to learn something? Is it to memorize something? How do you know when you’ve learned something?

Ulrich Boser: Really what we want to do is to be able to think in that way, so that it shifts our reasoning abilities. If we want to learn to become a car mechanic, you want to learn the reasoning abilities of a car mechanic. My favorite example of what it means to be expert, are the Car Talk guys. Because it’s such a weird thing, people call them and they have a car problem, but the Car Talk guys can’t actually see the car. Someone will call and be like, “I have this issue with my Buick, and it makes this weird noise,” and they’re able to solve the issue.

They’re thinking about their own Buicks, their own car problems, to help you solve your car problems. You want to learn the systems, or the analogies, of the relationships between things in a certain field, and how they interact with each other. Then ultimately you gain that knowledge so that you can shift your own thinking, so when you see a new problem you’re better able to solve it.

Khazan: You mentioned things that don’t work, like highlighting a lot, or skimming your notes before a meeting. Why don’t those work?

Boser: Re-reading and highlighting are particularly ineffective. They’re just passive, and you are just kind of skimming that material. It makes you feel better. You feel comfortable with the material, but you don’t really know the material. Doing things that are a little bit more difficult, that require you to really make connections, is a better way to learn. [You might] explain things to yourself, [or] simply quiz yourself. If you’re preparing for a meeting, you’d be much better off just putting the material away and just asking yourself questions. It gives you a false sense of security, that kind of re-reading.

Khazan: Why is teaching other people such an effective learning strategy?

Boser: It’s not that different from explaining ideas to yourself. Self-explaining has a lot of evidence. You’re explaining why things might be interconnected, and why they matter, and those meaningful distinctions between the two of them. The other thing that’s particularly helpful about teaching other people is that you have to think about what is confusing about something, and how you’d explain that in a simpler way, and so that makes you shift the way that you’re thinking about a certain topic.

Khazan: You mentioned that learning is, by necessity, really difficult. Why does it have to be so uncomfortable?

Boser: I think there’s so much stuff out there now that’s like, “Learning’s supposed to be easy, learning’s supposed to be fun!”

If I ask you, what’s the capital of Australia? Do you know what it is?

Khazan: [Breaks into a cold sweat.] Is it Sydney? I don’t know. It’s probably not.

Boser: No, it’s not Sydney. Another guess?

Khazan: Melbourne?

Boser: Nope. One more.

Khazan: Oh my God, I can’t believe I don’t know this. What’s another … Brisbane? I have no idea, I’m so sorry.

Boser: Yeah, it’s Canberra.

Khazan: What?

Boser: Yeah!

Khazan: Oh my God.

Boser: I had this experience with a researcher. I was in your spot, where I was like, “I’m so embarrassed by this. I should know, this is a major country.” The difficulty of that is going to help you remember it. I’m not going to promise you that you are going to remember the capital of Australia 10 years from now, but it’s now a much more salient fact. It’s something that’s a little bit more meaningful to you.

Both of us probably, at one time in the world, had this fact come across us, but it wasn’t meaningful, it certainly wasn’t an embarrassing situation. In my experience it was a source being like, “Do you know this?” I’m trying to be like, “I went to a fancy school, I should know this information.” It became salient to me. Part of the reason that learning’s supposed to be hard, or a little bit difficult, is it makes memory work a little bit more.

The other reason that learning should be difficult is that, when we’re a little bit out of our comfort zone, we are a little bit more challenged, and that helps us develop skills. We see this a lot in games. Part of the attraction of even a shoot-em-up game is that it’s always getting a little bit more difficult, and that way it’s building on our skill.

Khazan: What’s the most effective type of feedback that you could be getting in order to learn better?

Boser: What is helpful is that [the feedback] comes close to when you perform the task, and that it requires you to generate an answer. You don’t necessarily want to simply give people the answer, because then they haven’t really made that information meaningful to themselves. By forcing you to make these wrong guesses [about Australia], when you heard the actual answer, it made it more meaningful to you.

Khazan: Why is it helpful to distribute learning over time?

Boser: I find this one really fascinating. The basic thing is, we forget, and we forget at a very regular rate. People underestimate how much they forget, and people who are able to revisit their learning at a regular rate end up learning a lot more. There’s some good software that does that. Anki is one, and they have, I think, a really nice model, which is, you’re learning at your rate of forgetting. If we know that you’re going to forget details like the capital of France in three months, you would revisit that material at that particular point in time. What’s surprising about it is, this isn’t new. This is stuff that dates back to the 19th century, but we really just don’t use it in schools or in colleges, even though we know that people forget a lot, and they forget at this very regular rate.

Khazan: I was really interested to read about Bill Gates’ Think Week, where he reads all those white papers in a secluded cottage. Why does he do that in that way, and what can other people learn from that?

Boser: He just sort of squares away and has these moments of quiet in order to develop new skills. I think we really underestimate the role that deliberation and reflection plays in learning. To a degree we know it, this is why you think of things in the shower or right before you go to bed. You have these moments where your brain is thinking through the day, making connections, and what’s important, I think, for people who are trying to learn more effectively, is to make organized time for that. We’ve seen some schools have students do more reflections on their learning. There’s one or two studies that have even found that reflection can be more effective than practice itself.

Khazan: How can I get better at remembering peoples’ names?

Boser: One thing that helps with memory is if they’re emotional. You will not forget the name of the person that you gave your first kiss to. I don’t think this is, of course, a very practical solution to this problem.

Judah Pollack And Olivia Fox Cabane, Fast Company, Feb. 17, 2017

In the early 1890s, everybody wanted the newest technological marvel. Democratic and affordable, the bicycle could cut people’s commute to work in half and enable them to enjoy the countryside on the weekend. Thousands of bicycle mechanics appeared as if overnight, looking to make bicycles lighter, safer, more comfortable, and easier to produce. They would tinker with ball bearings, rolled steel, differential gears, air-filled tires, and so on.

Many of these enthusiasts would later use what they’d learned in bicycle workshops to create greater transportation breakthroughs. Both of the Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics. So was a man named Henry Ford, who watched mass production take hold at a time when cyclists began lobbying for better roads to be built. Before long, thanks to him, the modern automobile was ambling down them.

The more raw material you give your brain, the more connections it can make. It works a little like hitting “shuffle” on a playlist–the more songs you load it up with, the more surprised you’ll be by the one that comes on next, which may lead you to think differently about both. Perhaps you’ll get an idea for a totally different type of playlist, get inspired to write a song yourself, or even begin to think of music differently as a whole.

The human brain thrives on a wide range of ideas and experiences, especially those it isn’t expecting to encounter. In order to hit upon something really exciting, it first needs to wander, meander, shuffle about. Here’s how to help it.

Sow more seeds than you’ll harvest. When farmers sow seeds, they don’t know which will germinate, which won’t, and how many of those that do germinate will actually bear fruit. It’s nearly impossible to ensure a 100% germination rate. So what do they do? They sow more than they need.

Cognitively speaking, you should, too. Just fill your garden. Or if you prefer the earlier metaphor, add more songs to your playlist than you can possibly listen to in one sitting. That means doing your standard research–to get a handle on the underlying principles, the schools of thought, the ways things have been done or attempted, and succeeded or failed–but it also means looking much further afield, and not knowing what you’ll find.

Read books adjacent to your area of interest. If you’re a scientist, try some science fiction to expand your imagination–or brush up on the history of philosophy, as a way to see the different modes of thought that held people in check. You might discover something about the limits of your own thinking. If you’re a manager, read how the Mongols or the Romans structured their armies, and how they built common cause among soldiers from wildly different cultures.

If you read an article online, follow the links and see where they take you. You may end up down a totally unrelated rabbit-hole, and that’s okay, because you don’t know what might be of interest. You can’t know. This can be frustrating to those of us who prefer working toward a clear goal and hate “wasting time.”

But our brains don’t share that frustration. If you want to lead it toward more breakthrough ideas, you’ve got to let your brain stumble around a little, create uncertainty–and only learn afterward whether it was exactly what you needed, or all for naught.

Tapping others’ brains for breakthroughs. Popular mythology would have you believe that breakthroughs are a solo endeavor. But they seldom are. Most often, there are many contributors to major insights.

Talk to people doing the same thing as you are. Bell Labs, the famed research center to which we owe the transistor, the calculator, laser technology, UNIX, and many of today’s most essential technologies, famously encouraged its newest junior members to knock on the door of Nobel Prize winners and ask questions of “the guy who wrote the book.”

You should also talk to people doing something different but related. If you’re a manager in a health-care company, reach out to a manager at a retail company or a hospitality company. If you’re a business manager, learn about how to run a preschool. The garden-filling phase isn’t just about extracting information from other people, though. You also have to share your latest challenges; give people the context behind the questions you’re asking, the problems you’re working on, what’s making them so difficult, and what you’re hoping to achieve.

Whatever you do, keep your mindset open and unprejudiced; you never know who might have an interesting tidbit for you. Early components of breakthroughs don’t look like breakthroughs–they look like miscellaneous pieces of information. One trick is to keep certain topics at the forefront of your mind at all times so you’ll be more likely to notice when relevant pieces of information pass by.

Another trick is to draw people into talking about something they’re passionate about. Ask them when they first encountered this passion. Did they always love it or did it grow on them? What is it about the activity that speaks to them? You may hear about the history of the thing, the nuances, the best practices. These are excellent ingredients to gather.

Or just take a cue from Einstein. To develop his theories of relativity, Einstein didn’t just lock himself in a room and think. He had a group of friends he talked with almost every night. They called themselves the “Olympia Academy”: Michele Besso, Maurice Solovine, Conrad Habicht, and Einstein’s wife, Mileva.

On warm nights, they’d walk the streets of Bern, in Switzerland, and sit on the riverbank. Other times they’d climb to the top of Mount Gurten, lie on their backs, look up at the stars, and talk until dawn. Then they’d amble back into town and sit at a cafe, fueling themselves with coffee and ideas.

The group’s members were from fields as diverse as poetry and philosophy, and it was these conversations that helped to break open how he thought so that he could then “break open the universe.” In order to be innovative, Einstein first had to shift the way he actually thought–and that meant ranging far afield from physics.

By Ariana Eunjung Cha, Washington Post, July 10, 2012 ROME–Vincenzo Di Vita celebrated his retirement after nearly 40 years with the Italian postal service with a modest toast given by his co-workers in early December. He planned to hold a party at his home a few weeks later–but by then, he could no longer afford it.

Just days after Di Vita accepted a buyout designed to carry him until his government pension kicked in, Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti unveiled a program of tough measures to rein in public spending in the deeply indebted nation. Among the most radical changes: raising the minimum retirement age for men with Di Vita’s work experience from 62 to 65.

Di Vita was suddenly without a job and without a pension.

As many as 390,000 older Italians are in a similar predicament, and these “esodati” have moved to the center of the debate over whether austerity cuts are going too far.

As countries in Europe and beyond grapple with ballooning deficits and debts, government spending on pensions has become a popular target. The International Monetary Fund has recommended raising retirement ages to ease the financial burden associated with rising life expect­ancy.

More than four-fifths of the countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which represents advanced and emerging economies, are raising retirement ages or planning to do so. Fourteen countries–including several on the front lines of the European financial crisis, such as Italy, Spain, Greece and Ireland–are looking to increase their retirement ages to between 67 and 69 by 2050.

In Europe, the push for higher retirement ages represents a dramatic rewrite of the continent’s postwar social compact, and measures that keep people working longer could prove one of the most significant social legacies of the debt crisis.

But turning their citizens’ retirement plans upside down has been politically risky for leaders in a region that has the highest concentration of seniors in the world.

Greeks took to the streets in violent protest two years ago when the cash-strapped government in Athens agreed to austerity measures, including boosting the retirement age, in return for receiving a $150 billion bailout from the IMF and other European countries. In Spain, Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was voted out of office in December after he bumped the country’s retirement age from 65 to 67 earlier in the year. And in France, President Nicolas Sarkozy provoked a nationwide strike when he backed a proposal to lift the minimum retirement age from 60 to 62. He was ousted in elections in May by challenger Francois Hollande, who vowed during his campaign to roll back the measure and moved to do so shortly after he took office.

The retirement ages in even some of the euro zone’s healthiest economies have been raised. Germany and Denmark, for instance, have moved to cut back on pension costs as has Britain, the largest European economy outside the euro zone.

The issue has become so controversial in the United States that little action has been taken to address increasing retirement costs. Seniors are up in arms over proposals to revamp Social Security, and liberal advocacy groups have strenuously objected that changes would disproportionately harm the poor and minorities.

The esodati, or those of the exodus, were so named because they participated in company buyouts in the past few years arising from corporate restructurings and efforts to make room for the younger workers.

Through a temporary government fund called the cassa integrazione, many esodati had been given payouts large enough for them to live comfortably until their full benefits were triggered. For men, this usually happened at 65 but varied depending on how many years they had worked and how often they had contributed to their pensions. For women, the age was 60.

But when Monti raised the retirement age–to 68 for men and 63 for women in the private sector or 65 in the public sector–only a small fraction of esodati remained. It was only those who had handicapped children or fit other special criteria who remained covered.

Thousands of esodati, who have found one another on Facebook and e-mail lists, are petitioning Parliament for a repeal of the new law. One of Italy’s major parties, the Democratic Party, has threatened to block the passage of further labor changes if the government doesn’t take steps to help the esodati.

Last month, while speaking at a forum in Bologna, Monti acknowledged the toll the changes are taking but stopped short of offering a solution.

“I am sorry for the social discontent it has created,” he said. “We have real and human problems in front of us in an inhuman economic situation.”

Andrea Cavola, 56, a former finance manager for Alitalia airline, was once solidly middle-class but said he can’t afford basic items such as new prescription lenses for his glasses. He said he is so desperate that he’d be happy to take a job gardening or waiting tables but that no one will hire him because they think he’s overqualified.

“I now understand people who have attempted suicide. When you are in this situation, your world falls apart,” Cavola said.

Vincenzo Di Vita, 60, the son of a farmworker and homemaker from a poor part of northern Italy, worked as the administrator at the postal office in a town near Milan. When the reality of his new situation dawned on him, he said he immediately called his old bosses and begged for his job back.

Some Money.