Put a Real Timeline
When you enroll in a course, you have the materials organized, a reasonable timeline, and a mentor to guide you if you get lost along the way.
When you learn on your own, all these responsibilities shift to you.
You organize the material, figure out a reasonable timeline, and put guidelines to get you back on track when you get lost.
The challenging part is figuring out a reasonable timeline. When people want to learn something complex, a language, or a skill, put an unreasonable timeline.
They didn’t research to see how much time it would take them to learn. They put a random timeline trying to follow it but they can’t. The timeline is so wide that procrastinating becomes easy or the timeline is so tight that never meeting it is inevitable.
Either way, you find yourself taking more months than what you planned to take. To get yourself out of the timeline dilemma, you research what time it takes to learn and add a tolerance time.
A tolerance time is an extra time you put to yourself in case something goes wrong, which will happen if you’re learning on your own. From my experience, it can range from 50% of the original timeline to 200%.
So if learning a skill will take 10 hours, you set 15 hours for yourself to learn it at the minimum, and 30 hours to finish it at the maximum (10 hours + 10 hours * 200%)
