How to easily integrate Self-Study into your routine
How you can balance your hobbies, family commitments, health, and career with your self-study
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To those of you that don’t know, I recently appeared on Ken Jee’s podcast. One of the topics we covered was my approach to balancing time. My answer was pretty well-received, so I decided to go into it in more detail here.
In this piece, I will go over 7 actionable things you need to do to allow yourself to find time and balance your various commitments. This will allow you to set up your life in a way that allows you to constantly grow and learn while not burning yourself out.
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Keep in mind, this article is not the 7 commandments, but more of a checklist that I recommend. I will be going into more detail on these actionable steps in their own dedicated writeups. This is just an easy one-stop shop for anyone that wants to refer to them in one place.
The 7 Action Points for effortless growth
- Pick your poisons- Understand that everything you do has a hidden cost. By choosing to spend 1 hour eating, you can’t run a marathon during that one time. This is the idea of the opportunity cost, that I mention in this newsletter. The idea of min-maxing that I mentioned in the podcast is related to this idea. Essentially it is about living minimally in most avenues of life and just focusing on a few key areas. This frees up a lot of time and mental energy that would otherwise be spent on making uncritical decisions. You have to decide what is most important to you, and ruthlessly replace everything else. For example, some of you may know that I compete in Combat Sports. However, having gone back to school for one year, I no longer have a lot of time. Because of that I can no longer train as intensely/regularly and am competing at a heavier weight (so I don’t have to diet as much). You will have to make similar sacrifices.
- Rest a Lot.- No good comes from not resting. Make rest your primary priority. That will allow you to truly benefit from what you learn and stay consistent. Sleep, take breaks, and conserve your energy. All things will save you.
- Take it day by day- Instead of setting bigger goals like “50 Leetcode Questions in a month”, set smaller daily goals (1–2 LC questions a day). This makes adherence to your goals much easier since your goals become much more tangible.
- Take breaks to assess your situation- There is a lot of value in occasionally stepping back and reevaluating your situation. Is what you’re doing well-aligned with your objectives? Is there something you can do to improve your process? Is there something that needs to change, now that you have learned more? Maybe you notice that you struggle with trees but ace Regexs. Making the appropriate adjustment is a good call. I suggest assessing your learning so on a weekly basis.
- Cap your self-study to 1–2 hours a day- Don’t burn the midnight oil. You need your energy and have other commitments. Doing too much is as harmful as doing too little. 1–2 hours a day of deep study is more than enough to progress your learning very quickly.
- Analyze your progress obsessively- Make sure that you track your performances. What gets measured gets improved. When you struggle with a question, try to figure out what you struggled with. Was it coding? Theoretical Knowledge? Speed? Edge cases? Understanding terminology? Having a detailed analysis of your learning journey allows you to grow at a rapid-fire pace.
- Celebrate progress not milestones- It’s easy to get frustrated and quit. Especially starting off, when progress isn’t always noticeable. The antidote to this is in celebrating your small wins. Instead of defining your success as ‘Solved LC problem’/ ‘Got promotion’ focus on progress-related markers like, ‘Was able to explain X better than before’ or ‘Recognized a business case for an idea that I had missed previously’. These will be better friends for your mental health and consistency. Tracking your progress will help a lot with this.
I will be doing more detailed posts on these points to go into more detail. Stay tuned, for those.
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