One of the ideas I've known about for years, and have found handy more than once, is dividing learning up into two types: "packing" and "mapping". Packing is taking a factoid and remembering it, and another, and another, until you've got lots and lots of individual facts you can look up; mapping is looking at a pile of facts, seeing some correlations, and realizing you can turn a pile of a dozen facts into a single, smaller map. The classic examples are probably looking at the equations for electricity and magnetism, and realizing they could be mapped out into a single electromagnetic force; or all sorts of insights in pure mathematics; or in much less abstract and personal terms, listing out a pile of things that you like and noticing a pile of them could be described as subsets of a larger category, and said category introducing you to new things you like. (For example, I happen to like Morse Code, Lojban, Tengwar, Commodore 64s, and Fortran, among other related things, which I could all file under "obscure and obsolete communications and computations". Which suggested I might like Unifon, IBM 790 mainframes, and balanced-ternary-logic computers.)

In my depression-inspired story "IO.SYS" ( https://www.datapacrat.com/IO.SYS.html ), I made a passing reference to a motto, "ten to the n", which I can describe as "the goal of surviving for 10^n years into the future, where n is a real number", which is a ridiculously complicated way of saying "goal: not dying, now or ever". This happens to take a pile of individual goals, ethics, and philosophies - from extropianism and transhumanism (which itself is merely a simplification of humanist ethics to avoid having to deal with exceptions for non-human people) to Maslow's hierarchy of needs to the prepper mindset to politics to Scouting to all sorts of other things.

Ie:

For n = -6, the duration is 30 seconds. What do I have to do to survive the next half a minute? Usually, not much, but when my survival for that period is in question, I'm going to work as hard as I can - put pressure on an arterial spray, try to swim to the surface, run away from the carbon-monoxide alarm, trying to avoid active bullets.

For n = -4, that's most of an hour. Is there anything, beyond what I need to do to survive a half-minute, to survive the next hour? Again, usually not much, but whatever it is, is going to be almost as high in priority as for n = -6; avoiding hypothermia, calling poison control, and a lot of the other first-aid training you might learn in Scouting.

For n = -2, we're dealing with half a week. We're starting to climb into the basics of Maslow's Pyramid, making sure we've got the basics for survival: shelter and clothes to avoid too much exposure to the elements, enough water to drink, that sort of thing.

For n = -1, around a month, we've nudged up a bit on Maslow, and are in the prime prepper mindset territory; either having a large enough pantry to avoid having to shop for weeks at a time, or having enough of a bank account or income to continue to afford food.

For n = 0, that's working on surviving for one full year. In Maslow's terms, we're edging from what he calls 'survive' to 'thrive' motivations; having enough stability in employment (or other income) to avoid having to worry about running out of cash before getting another job, engaging with family and community and whatever other social support structures are feasible, having enough slack time to do enjoyable stuff and avoid a depressive spiral.

For n = 1, we're working on surviving a full decade. By this point, we're branching into larger-scale stability, trying to find ways to help the local large-scale social-support organization system - which, these days, basically means "government", from front-line health-care to disability payments - keep being able to support you. I can't realistically expect to test all my own food for botulism; if I get cancer or have a heart attack, I'm not going to be able to pay the full cost of hospitalisation and treatment. The very least I can do is vote against whoever wants to reduce my safety net. (And as my depression gets wrestled into something more manageable, I can start doing more than the very least.)

For n = 2, we're talking about surviving for a full century. I'm an adult, so living this long is going to require living longer than anyone has managed in reliably-recorded history. There are a few possibilities; if I keep good enough care of myself, and technology continues advancing gradually, I just might live long enough for science to reach "actuarial escape velocity". If a Singularity happens in 10-30 years, I just might be able to help find a way to nudge the event away from an extinction threat and more towards, say, mind-uploading, ala Robin Hanson's "The Age of Em". If I die before either of those, I could have myself cryonically preserved, my just-barely-dead body preserved until such time as technology advances to the point where it can cure both whatever killed me plus the extra problems introduced by cryopreservation.

For n = 3, surviving for a millennia... the range of what can be experienced is so incredibly broad that it's hard to make any predictions. But a few very general ideas can be figured out; for one, I'd have to have already survived through n = 2, meaning some form of transhuman technology is on the table. For another, a basic tenet of digital data storage is much like the prepper's "rule of 3": if you only have one copy, then given how often bad things happen, you really only have zero copies, so you'd better spread backups to multiple offsite locations.

... All of which manages to compress and map 9 orders of magnitude of time, and a host of disparate modes of thought, into a single approach, which itself can be summed up into a 3- or 4-characters mnemonic: 10^n (or 10ⁿ, if your character-set includes superscript letters).

Of course, the usual caveats apply; no map is perfect, no map covers all possibilities in full detail, a map is simply a handy mental tool that's useful for helping make decisions. But as long as the map is reasonably consistent with reality, it can be a /very/ useful tool for the area and scale it covers.