Continuing My Education

Edit - July 15th, 2024:

After about a month of attempting this system I am putting it on pause. There are a few problems I have encountered thus far:

• Despite setting a goal of 7 hours per week, I have not put in place a real system to achieve this goal.
• 7 hours per week is difficult to achieve during weeks of extended work or vacation, the system does not account for this.
• Reflecting once a week is difficult given that 7 hours of a more bland activity such as reading a textbook do not translate into interesting reflections.
• Finding time to write a blog post once a week has thus far proven difficult.

To be clear I am not putting my continuous education on pause, just the system conceptualized in the original post of tracking and recording my education progress.

I am going to review and improve my plan below upon finishing two books I am currently working through: Atomic Habits by James Clear, and Slow Productivity by Cal Newport.

Original Post:

One of the biggest things I miss the most about college is the constant learning. Every day I was exposed to new concepts and ideas. Although I feel that I have learned a lot in my short professional career, there are some pitfalls that I have noticed.

I feel that it is entirely too easy to slip into a rut of complacency at work. Once I have figured out what does the job, what incentive do I have to try and make that thing better? I feel that often there is simply not enough time in the day to even get done what I need to, much less look back at what I have previously done and improve on it.

I also feel that this problem is compounded at a fast paced venture-backed startup. Code reviews are only done when there is time, new features are prioritized over improving existing ones, and technologies that have been proven to work are used everywhere because the time to upskill on potentially better alternatives is not available. The team is small and everyone wears many hats which means that everyone is a good at a lot, but nobody is really an expert in anything.

So the problem is that I want to learn more new things. What is the solution?

Say hello to the newest entrant in the University of Continuous Learning! There is only one course and it is 7 credit hours. There are no grades or exams, just a requirement to write about what has been learned at the end of each week. The course is on whatever I want and can change week to week or even hour to hour. Ideally this is one hour per day of learning each week, but this system also allows me to spend a Saturday reading if the week is too busy, or doing a few hours each day after work if my weekend is booked up.

I want these credit-hours to be as easy as possible to achieve. I should be able to do them in a car, on the toilet, or waiting in line at the grocery store. To achieve this I am going to allow a broad set of actions to count as time towards credit-hours. Examples include:

• Reading a textbook or any book, in any medium (on a phone, computer, in paperback, etc.)
• Doing problems on Leetcode, Hack the Box, etc.
• Deeply researching some topic on wikipedia, at the library, etc.
• Any time spent on a project where I feel as though I achieved or learned something. The qualifier is self-discretionary, writing boilerplate code probably doesn’t count.
• Taking courses on Khan Academy

I mulled around the thought of excluding project work from the credit-hours for a while. My rationale was that I didn’t want one project to consume me, and that by requiring the credit-hours be some activity other than my current project, I could build in breaks for myself. The downside to this is that what if I spend all of a Saturday working on something cool, now none of those hours count? If I am really engrossed in something I don’t want to penalize myself for that. Project hours make the cut.

At the end of each week (Sunday), I am going to reflect on what I learned in my 7 credit hours in a post. At the end of each season (financial quarters are too corporate), I am going to reflect on my favorite things I learned, and if I was able to apply that knowledge in any areas of my life since learning it.

It is my hope that with this system I can take the time I spend doom-scrolling the news or playing Pokemon on my phone and put it towards enriching myself. When I am ‘bored’ instead of mindlessly opening a web browser or an app, I can work on improving myself via knocking out credit-hours. By completing this baseline of self-investment I should be able to look back what what I have done and reassure myself that I am moving forward and not stagnating.

There is so much interesting knowledge out there and I want to soak up as much of it as I can before I go.