There was a really interesting thread in the Discord the other day, with the title above. If you’re a member and have access, here’s the link. User @bagool said they were stuck in “analysis paralysis” trying to figure out how to spend what little extra time they had:
I’m curious how do you use your time doing things like following a course, watching a conference talk, reading tech blog posts and/or books, working on personal projects etc. Do you have a system, or just go with the flow?
Responses
purpshell
I just go with the flow, especially when I see an interesting talk on YouTube or something. Though when I am following a course, I set a small but significant daily goal to work on it. I find creating schedules and strictly following them a huge turnoff from learning.
mvaldes
I dedicate the last 30 mins before bedtime to read up an article or a chapter on a tech book. Courses are harder since I usually take notes, so those are done whenever I have downtime.
Mark_who?
I carve out 30 mins a day for learning. Sundays are my deep dive days. I’ll maintain a list of tech blogs to read through that are of interest in the spaces I work in. I have client work I need to attend to outside of that time and every time I’m writing code, refactoring, or bug fixing I’m learning something as is. Need to find more time for personal side projects though.
Eric/a
I schedule time in my work schedule for learning. 30 minutes daily and an hour or two on Friday. If I don’t put it on my schedule it doesn’t happen. Consistency with small chunks makes way more progress than trying to learn something all at once.
Jesco
In my off hours, what I used to do pre AI is buy books from Packt, O’Reley or Apress where the title catches my attention or a whole host of them when sales drop.
Post AI, what I do is have ChatGPT give me a quiz on work related (Salesforce) or skills I have obtained throughout the years (F#, Ruby and so on) to test my knowledge. Depending on the results, I may have ChatGPT to give me a harder quiz to further test my knowledge or ask it to explain why my answer was wrong.
Marc
I personally have an Obsidian note for learning that links to all associated courses and topics/articles I’m interested in. Every now and then I think who I want to be in the future, and sort it based on that. Learning comes and goes, but I am always so happy when I invest into myself more deeply through courses and feel excited at the end that I’ve actually done something and become better. But when I’m just scrolling youtube and twitter / etc, I feel like drained and burnt out. Like junk food versus healthy food in a weird way.
Tonydc
Taking a tip from Atomic Habits that helped me up-skill on my spare time. If you want to start a habit, start small, you don’t have to go all out on the on-set, focus on putting in the reps first and building the habit. I started with 10 minutes a day of up-skilling on a topic I am interested in, then once it became part of my everyday life, I started making it longer, from 10 minutes to 20, from 20 to 30, so on and so forth.
When I was in high school, I knew of an older acquaintance who was having difficulties as he transitioned from a regular desk job, to starting his own business, shortly after also starting a family with his wife.
He came up with a clever solution (as far as I know, he was only dealing with the two time pulls, work and family, but still a good idea). He found that changing his shoes helped him decide to keep on task!
When he deliberately changed into his work shoes, and the (family landline, I know… ) phone rang, he would not want answer it because mentally, he would not want to take his shoes off.
It’s sounds trivial, but I think it’s a smart idea.