2 cents on time management
First of all I think learning new skills, at least in the beginning takes a lot of time. At least that’s the case for me. Once you’ve mastered a foundation of said skill it’s a lot easier to build upon and thus gets easier to improve the skill. So if you’re venturing in learning a new skill from scratch as I’m sort of doing right now. I think it’s good to dedicate a big chunk of your time to just learning it
How do you work with time management? It’s a tricky question. Earlier this year while I was working I was trying to keep up learning as well. It worked to some extent, although back then I didn’t keep track of how much time I was dedicating to my learning process. I found it a bit difficult to keep myself motivated. And at the end of the working day I’d rather just slack and do other stuff.
Now I have the opposite problem, I have loads of time but not the kind of structure a job gives you. So as I started to track my time it started to give me a structure that I could follow. I could set goals and improve the amount of hours I was learning programming. At the same time it would track how many hours I was doing other things than actually learning in front of the computer.
I use the social sharing component as partly a support mechanism and partly an accountability mechanism. Every week I’ve been including the amount of learning time as well as the amount of time spent just surfing the web. Learning programming and using the browser is not mutually exclusive of course. But it’s very easy to go off at a tangent and find interesting stuff and the day just flies away.
That’s definitely a key take away; to limit yourself to as few websites as possible while you’re trying to learn. If I look at the webhistory of the last month the websites that I’ve visited less than 2 minutes are 850 websites which amounts to the total time of 8 hours. An entire working day!
So how do I actually track it all? I use a small application called “Timing” on Mac. Neat unobtrusive app that tells you how many hours you spend on either certain applications or projects of yours. I think you could derive a lot of other uses from the the data as well.
If you had the data, what questions would you ask or find out? What patterns would you look for?