Optimize Your Learning According to What is Scarce

One of the nice things about being a professional software developer is that you're always learning things. On a given day, you might be learning about

• A programming language or framework
• Your computer or operating system
• Your tools (like editors, build systems and IDEs)
• The domain you're working in (finance, biology, energy, games, etc.)
• How to communicate with your collaborators
• How to effectively manage the projects you're working on

There are many things to learn. Indeed, one of the problems you might have is finding all of the things that you want to learn about.

There are lots of ways to try to explore these topics: aggregators like Lobsters or the disappointingly neoliberal orange website; following the blogs or Twitter feeds of programmers you like; the many, many podcasts devoted to various facets of the profession. I partake in my fair share of these things, but I've come to see a lot of it as futile or counterproductive.

I collect things from these channels with the intention of coming back to them later when I have time and energy to invest in them "properly". This would be a very useful thing to do if I was about to enter a period of my life with a surplus of free-time and vigour, where I'd have time and energy for sitting down with a new tool to engage in deliberate, effortful practice so that I can develop and retain a mental model of how it works and gain some fluency in the skills I need to operate it.

Of course, I'm not about to enter a magical period of free-time and vigour. It feels like I might; it's human nature to underestimate how much effort things in the future will take. A more realistic assessment is that tomorrow will be just as difficult and today, and I won't miraculously have time for all these conference talk videos and neat looking blog posts. In the meantime, the aggregation sites and social media feeds will be happy to enable my browsing and collecting habit for as long as I care to click on the links they put in front of me.

I suspect that I'm not the only software developer who experiences this. I also suspect that, like me, other software developers also feel fear-of-missing-out and anxiety that they're being left behind. As you can probably guess, these feelings are entirely detrimental, with no discernible benefit to my professional effectiveness or personal well-being. I'm sure they're just as helpful to the industry at large.

Though I have expressed a desire to learn things, my behaviour reveals a desire to collect URLs and then never look at them again. There's a dangerous combination of hyperbolic discounting, FOMO, and operant conditioning by websites that want me to click on one more link standing between me and that sweet, sweet personal/professional development.

How to approach learning with an accurate view of what's scarce

Here are the things that help me overcome my shortage of time and energy and actually learn stuff. Naturally, these are all subjective and may not work for you, but hopefully they'll be a useful starting place.

• Don't pretend that browsing the web is helping you learn. Try to do something that will let you accrue time and energy instead. This is quite hard, because you need at least a little bit of time and energy to figure out how to gain more time and energy later, and it's usually not obvious how you should go about doing it.

• Recognize that learning will take resources, and allocate them. You're not going to master a new technology in two hours with a video course and a coffee. Be realistic about the time and effort you need to achieve your goals; carve out a place for them rather than trying to achieve them with whatever you happen to have at your disposal.

• In my experience, the best way to learn technical skills is to use them. Write programs with that language; build a thing with that framework; spin up and operate that database. The best way I've found to do that (given the constraints on time and energy that we're trying to overcome) is to pick a project, scope it down until it will only take a few hours, execute it, and then re-evaluate. This makes the up-front commitment achievable and taps into all those delicious goal-setting incremental progress dopamine productivity hacks that we humans are so susceptible to.

• If you can, get a book. I usually learn more effectively from an old fashioned pulp-and-pigment book than from an equivalent website or PDF. There might be a deep, neurological or social reason for this, or it might be because "reaching for my phone" is enough of a barrier that the usual digital temptations are less appealing than turning the page.

• Choose things that you don't want to learn. I find that the huge pile of things I want to learn is less scary if I periodically take chunks off of it and throw them into the pile of things I don't need to learn. Even if deciding that I don't care to learn assembly language, RISC-V, blockchain, PHP, and the Unity game engine won't free up all the time and energy it would take to learn all the things I want to learn, it nevertheless makes me feel better.

Your time is valuable. Thanks for spending some of it with me. I hope something you've read will help you make good choices about learning.