The Key to Find Time for Learning

• Most adults who are juggling work, parenting and self-care find it hard to set aside time to learn anything new.
• The desire to learn is there, as one knows the importance of upgrading one’s skill sets. The challenge is to find the time to learn.
• The most fundamental strategy is not to spread ourselves too thin, and have only one project at a time. If we want to learn tennis, painting and coding, we need to pick one first.
• If multiple projects are important to us, we still need to focus on learning one project at a time and pick the second one after progress is made on the first one.

We need to make learning as easy as possible by setting the right environment.

We can do this by:

1. Having the required materials with us at all times.
2. Setting up our workstation or working area in such a way that we can start our learning session in a few seconds.
3. If we have only 15 or 20 minutes a day to learn, we can try batching together any unpleasant pre-learning task beforehand, to avoid friction.

The hidden reason our learning projects don’t see the light of the day is that we don’t align them with our existing work, social pursuits, family time or other sources of meaning in our lives.

Example: Learning a new language becomes easy if we are teaching it to our kid daily.

Most of us believe we are killing time when we play video games or watch Netflix, or simply scroll through the endless doom feeds of Facebook.

It is imperative to know that we cannot really kill time, which is eternal and which eventually kills us. We could make use of our limited time and do something productive, but it is hard as we are spoilt for choice.

Finding time is ultimately the question of motivation, and if something excites us enough, we will find time for it.

When distraction is just a click away, it is hard to learn something. Time is a huge barrier to progress, but it is our choices of where we put our attention and effort that really impacts our learning.

The way out of this is to suspend all activities we normally spend our time on, like the TV, smartphones, games, and social media. Then slowly reintroduce the ones we cannot live without. This way we will have plenty of time to accommodate learning.