How to Fit Learning into a Busy Schedule 🚌👩‍💻🎪

At Curricular, we spend a great deal of our time learning, since we review and test dozens of courses every month.

But we also spend time learning new skills.

Currently, I'm trying to learn more about using AI for life and business - training and optimizing models, automating pipelines, and more.

How's it going? I've learned a lot, but I've been swamped with other stuff, so I'm a bit behind where I wanted to be.

So this post is for me as well as for you - I need to take my own advice. Hopefully this post helps us all make significant progress towards our goals.

While no single bit of advice can help everyone in every situation, here are a few strategies for fitting learning into a busy schedule.

Prerequisite: Know Your Priorities

In 15 years in the developer education industry, I've seen one thing consistently separate learners who stay on track and those who don't.

Priority.

If you don't prioritize learning, it doesn't happen. It's the same for people trying to break into the industry as for professional devs adding more skills to get promoted.

So before trying to fit learning into your schedule, it's best to check in on your priorities. Where does learning stack up against everything else going on in your life? And I mean everything, from work to family obligations to exercise to sleeping to Netflix.

I'm not suggesting learning should come before things like sleep, family, and work. But you should at least take inventory of all the things competing for your time, attention, and energy. And assess how important those things are for you in your life.

If your learning goal is making a career transition, you might find you need to make some pretty significant sacrifices. When I was with the coding bootcamp App Academy, I met hundreds of students who were basically putting their life on hold to learn software development, and making agreements with the people in their lives to make space for the intensive program. But with life-changing results on the line, it's an investment they and their families and friends were willing to make.

Again, that's not for everyone. But the prioritization exercise is probably the biggest step you can take to find time for learning.

Audit Your Schedule

Now that you've done one exercise identifying everything competing for your time, and the priority of those things, it's time to look at how much time everything takes.

The goal here is to surface how much time you have for learning, and cutting a few lower-priority things in order to make space for learning.

Overall, a time audit will give you a good idea for exactly how much time you can realistically budget for learning.

If you want to be hardcore, you could do an in-depth calendar study, where you chart how you spend time for a few weeks. That's everything from sleep to work to commuting to meals to Netflix. All of it goes on the calendar.

There are apps that can help you do this automagically. I've typically used a simple method: setting an alarm for every hour during the day, and when the alarm goes off, I spend 1-2 minutes to log how I just spent the previous hour (during the evening, I logged my time once or twice).

Visualizing where your time actually goes can be eye-opening. You'll probably notice you spend a lot of time on unplanned stuff. But you'll also probably find several blocks in your schedule that could be repurposed into learning time in future weeks.

Depending on your life situation and your learning goals, you might find that you need to re-prioritize some things to make space for learning. What you're really hoping to find are those things that are low priority but that you spend lots of time on. Replace as many of those with learning as you can.

You might also find that there's not currently any space for learning in your schedule; that you can't cut anything you're spending time on. If that's the case, it's ok. This might not be a season where you can invest in learning, or at least for a significant amount of time.

Again, when looking for things to cut, be sure to leave time for wellness. Exercise, cooking, leisure, and sleep are all important parts of wellbeing. Don't sacrifice the essentials for the sake of learning - otherwise you'll burn out, and the results will be worse than not spending the time learning.

Microlearning and Time Heisting

Long focused learning blocks on your computer are a must, especially for practicing programming and synthesizing multiple concepts.

But microlearning (and learning on the go) can be a great for making some incremental progress on individual concepts.

We're living in a golden age of flexible learning, with podcasts, books (physical and digital), blogs, tutorials, livestreams, as well as courses.

A 10-15 minute blog post or YouTube tutorial can help you grasp the basics of concepts. And often it's easier to find 15 minutes than to find an hour. Most of these formats can be consumed on your phone, while you're commuting or on lunch break.

And if you're able to convert the time commuting, at lunch, or waiting for your coffee order into progress towards your learning goals, you can consider it a time heist - time you had to spend waiting for something anyway.

Appointment Learning

If you're like me, prioritizing learning means getting it on my calendar, as an appointment. The time is marked busy and I can't schedule over it.

If I don't treat learning that seriously, I'll find some other way to spend the time (let's face it, probably on social media or Netflix).

The goals here are 1) to make sure I take the time to learn and 2) to make learning a consistent habit. Skills are like muscles - if you don't use them consistently, you have a harder time building them up and maintaining them.

For best results, try to schedule your learning for when you’re at your best. Are you a morning person or night owl? That's your best time to learn.

When scheduling your learning, don’t overdo it. Start out with something that's easy to accomplish and can help you build momentum.

If you’re planning to learn full time or for large chunks, spend some building up to that schedule. Try learning for a little bit every day, like 1-2 hours in the afternoon. Then build up to longer stretches a few times per week.

Check in and Iterate

Plan to iterate on your learning schedule. Life happens, so keeping the same schedule isn't realistic.

When starting out with a learning plan, give yourself a week or two with and then do a quick check-in. Ask yourself is this sustainable or do I need to adjust right away? And then check-in every few weeks after that.

Block Out Distractions to Maximize Learning

Sometimes the best way to optimize your schedule for learning is to optimize your learning blocks.

Consider learning in the same location or space. For me, going to a specific place for studying gives me a kind of muscle memory - when I'm in this place, this is what I do. A short commute helps as well. I like to walk to a nearby cafe, which helps me clear out all the noise from work so I can focus on learning.

If my library was closer, I'd probably walk there.

During my learning time, I have my phone face down and on silent. I close whatever browser windows I'm not using for learning. I hit Focus mode on iOS, usually for 1 hour. There are apps that can help with this; for me, the act of deliberately closing everything out helps me focus on learning.

Destination Learning

Now I'm going to contradict myself a bit here.

Earlier I mentioned it's good to build up to long blocks of learning. While that's true, it can also be good to schedule an extended block of learning and just go for it. You're not likely to burn out from a short sprint.

So this technique is to book a learning vacation: a dedicated weekend or week to take a break from everything else and just focus on learning.

Just be aware that if you do plan a getaway, you might find yourself with a new set of distractions. So don't choose somewhere too awesome, with lots of activities you want to do.

Obviously this technique is geared more towards taking a small but significant step forward in your skills. If you're in the midst of a longer learning journey, this can be helpful for focused practice time, like working on a portfolio project.

What Do You Think?

Have you tried any of these techniques or other things to make progress on your learning goals? Let me know in the comments.