Ask HN: How do you manage self-study?

I was having very similar thoughts to you about a month ago. For me I decided to take a bit more of a “holistic” approach in the sense that I wanted to learn backend development, architecture etc so decided to create a website and set everything up by scratch.

I over engineered everything - I have a CI/CD pipeline for a wordpress website that I really do not need but it meant that I now know how to do it.

Not only that I force myself once a week to write about what I’ve learned that week for my development for my blog that nobody really know exists. But it keeps me accountable for having to continuously learn and improve.

I’m currently setting up my website in various regions then knocking them out to see how I can make sure everything stays online whilst also piping all my server logs to a logging platform.

"Often I am so overwhelmed that I just watch stuff on youtube." That's was funny )) I would recommend reading some books on this topic for ex: Essentialism, The power of habit. In general, this comes from a lack of priority so use the Eisenhower Matrix to establish that priority and make the conscious decision to do the one thing which is most important.

I'm hoping my reply is more helpful than it sounds at first glance... This is one of those questions where I read and then exclaim (rhetorically), "what's wrong with people?!"

Don't take this the wrong way, I often exclaim this. You are quite possibly in the majority and I'm the odd one.

To me it has always seemed inherently clear that the way to approach life is to do something if you enjoy it. If you stop enjoying it then do something else. I will naturally need a break from doing something after a while (hours, days, weeks), and so I'll put it down and pickup something else.

As a recent article on HN mentioned, "enthusiasm is worth 25 IQ points."

When it comes to self-guided activities such as this, there has never been a "should" or "best" for me. I just follow what I enjoy, perhaps guided secondarily by what may be useful. (Actually, I enjoy things that are useful, so perhaps that intertwines these concepts for me). I suspect I didn't thrive at university for this reason, while in the real world I know a number of people who would call me an overachiever.

PS. I have a few friends with some degree of ADHD. These friends may often feel overwhelmed by a large number of choices or tasks, to the point of inaction. I'm not saying this applies to you, but I just thought it was worth mentioning.

Each ticket is a specific course/book/tutorial so it's easy to know if I've completed it or not.

Hi Raph, what's up? When it comes to improving yourself and learning new things, I think attitude is more important than tools. There is only so much you can get out of organizing your goals, resources and time if you overstretch yourself. I have found two techniques useful in terms of focusing my time and energy: Extrapolating from future achievements and elimination.

What I mean with "extrapolating from future achievements" is setting concrete goals in terms of where I want to be in five years, or what I would like to be able to say I achieved, and working backwards from there. I feel that the main reason many people engage with new ideas, technologies, tools etc. is the infamous FOMO, fear of missing out. We fear that we will be left out, worth less if we don't read this article or learn that programming language. If there is no actual driving force behind an approach to a topic, learning it will cost you a lot of energy. You will need to remind yourself again and again why you are putting in the time and effort, and even worse, the next shiny thing will be extremely distracting. If you start with the knowledge that it's taking you somewhere, however, you will have much more internal drive.

Elimination is just not doing things. You have three languages you want to learn? Drop two. Two books on algorithms? Drop one, or maybe even drop both and do some sports instead. I know this sounds silly; you are asking how you can get better at learning things, and I'm telling you not to learn them in the first place. But I think this is a key talent; dropping things and not looking back, not feeling bad about it, not losing any sleep over a missed opportunity. Everyone knows deep down that there is enough time only to concentrate on a couple of topics and areas in one lifetime; you can be a novice at many topics, but being an expert requires huge amounts of time and dedication. And the only way to bring these is by eliminating other topics. The previous technique of extrapolating from the future is useful here. Do you want to be called a great roboticist in 5 years? Then you will have to drop the ML. You want to be a great Rust programmer? You will have to let Clojure go.

I hope this is useful. What you have to keep in mind is that deep, multi-faceted expertise in a single area is very valuable, both as a trade and for you individually, to feel great about what you do. Acquiring this expertise is very difficult. You will need to put in a lot of honest work, will have a lot of dead ends and frustrations, and frequent doubts regarding your choice. Nevertheless, you should try to pick one area of expertise and eliminate all other efforts that don't contribute to your prowess at it.