Simple but productive ways to manage your online study while working full time
“Tell me something boy, are you happy in this modern world?” — Lady Gaga
I bet most of us are not happy with the status quo. We all want to advance career, chase a more glamorous path or just to get rid of a dead-end job. With the explosion of MOOCs, forums and youtube tutorials, you think to yourself it must be easy to pick up a new skill. Really? Have you ever made ambitious daily checklist, weekly goal, and new year resolutions filled with things to study, but can never finish even 50%? Too bad. By the time you read mountains of success stories like someone smoothly pivoting careers and landing $$$ offers while still having a full-time job, you are done. “Maybe it’s not really for me after all.”
I was in this exact situation a few months ago. Thankfully I didn’t just stop there. Instead I try to look at things from a different perspective, and try to plan my study explicitly. My productivity ends up 3x what I was before. There are only three points I want to make below and none of them is related to working much harder than you were before, I promise.
First, focus is really the key. I cannot stress this hard enough. It’s really easy to lose it. It goes like this: I want to learn the hottest thing, it seems the answer is machine learning. Oh that and the bitcoin stuff! Someone just told me that building things is so cool so I will add CS50 from Harvard… The list never stops. When I started the journey, I keep a lengthy checklist: machine learning, blockchain, creative writing, web development, linear algebra, guitar, parenting and so on. The worse possible form of study is to dabble on each subject like one hour a week. You will never master any of them. The human learning curve starts fairly flat before it accelerates. When you switch subject you essentially reset the whole thing back to zero.
So, cut your checklist!! One is the best, two is the max. Cut the less urgent stuff first, if there are still too many, cut the urgent stuff. The stuff you learn should ideally give you some intrinsic motivation.
You need depth to achieve mastery in a subject. When you have five things in the pipeline, the natural inclination is to rush through each one and move on. Now the online course is designed like gambling machines that make you addicted to compete. That’s fine but you cannot sacrifice quality over completion. That’s why you should choose some subjects that you feel intrinsically motivated. That way you won’t get two attached to the progress bar. Have it ever come across your mind that this thing feels a bit rusty but hey I will go back to this in the future. I promise you never will. Don’t leave stone unturned.
Be reminded that you need to check out the lecture video, exercises, extra reading and most importantly, practice!!! If you want to learn programming or say data science, you are not learning anything until you practice. Working on projects of real world problems is the best form.
Another hack I find helpful is to write your thoughts down. If there is anything you feel that is worth sharing, share it. Be it twitter, medium or your personal notebook, it doesn’t matter. Writing is like teaching, you cannot do that unless you have the clearest form of thinking. I always feel I learn the things again when I write or teach.
All the things above are not remotely possible if you are not focusing. So do focus!!!
Second, scale down your expectations, massively. Success stories sound sexy because they are rare and most likely exaggerated. The other day I read an interesting tweet, unfortunately I cannot remember the author, it goes like this: reading tech journalism is like reading tourism guide of a place you live for a long time, you simply cannot match the scrappy place with the description full of staggering adjectives. It is in the human nature to make writing, talking sound more attractive and there is nothing wrong with that. Don’t let that drive your expectation sky high though.
Even we forget about all this polishing game, circumstances are most certainly different. Those amazing stories might not come from something who need to worry about family financed, who have a super demanding boss, who have a kids to care for … If that’s the case, it makes sense to be slower than those glamorous cases. We all see greatness but we never see the struggle behind that. If there is one thing I learn from successful people, it’s that they all struggle at certain points. Reports never write those, because they sound trivial. If you struggle, you can be sure you are not alone.
Even we forget all above, people, sadly, learn at a different rate. I hate to type this but it is so true. I read a funny quote that only after you put in hard work then you will realize how important talent is…. It all sounds a bit passive but who cares? What only matters is how much difference you make for yourself. I would rather finish 100% on a 50-score goal than 10% on a 100-score goal. Plus, I’m not even sure if talent is the best predictor for success. One of my favorite Paul Graham quote goes like this: “If you imagine this hypothetical person who’s like 100 out of 100 for smart and 100 out of 100 for determination, and then you start taking away determination, it doesn’t take very long to before you have this ineffectual but brilliant person; instead if you take someone is super determined, and you start taking away smartness, eventually you get to some someone who owns a lot of taxi medallions but still rich!” This says it all.
So, don’t set sky-high expectations! Make sure you are super-determined on your super-focused target that is just a little bit stretchy, and you are 80% done.
Third, plan your study by hours, not by days or months. This is the best way to remain realistic and focused. When I get started, I plan study by weeks. For instance, I want to finish two lectures on a course and one lecture on another one. It doesn’t sound too many. A week passes by, it seems like only I only finished one. The bad part is, I don’t even know why that is the case. It is all very confusing.
Well, mistakes I made were that I wasn’t focused and my plan wasn’t granular enough so that I have zero idea if my goal is too ambitious. The correct way is look at what is the guiding hours for finishing a lecture and plan how many hours you can study. Any one single study session shouldn’t be less than 2 hours. If I can study for three hours in a day, five days a week, that comes to 15 hours solid study time. If a course like CS50 guides 10–20 hours a week, then I can only finish a week’s worth of study materials. If you want to stretch yourself a little bit, then finish 3 lectures in 2 weeks, but not anything more than that because you have to be realistic. Unlike work, study is much more predictable. Planning by hours gives you a great visualization of your progress.
Well that’s it! If you stay focused, if you set realistic goals, and plan your study by hours, you will stay on track, increase your productivity and inflate the quality of your study. In the first three months I started, I only finished 1.5 courses and pretty much forgot what I learned. In the past three months, I finished five online courses by using this method and achieved more than 95% mark in all of them. Additionally I have finished two data science projects as a practice for those courses. The difference is so striking and I even felt less burnt out.
