Ask HN: How do you manage self-study?

I am 77 year now and all I did was reading as much as possible. Learning C# an C++ at my age of 75 and still building hard an software for pleasure. In my Opinion, as long you are interesting in some kind of things, everything is possible. Off course sometimes it can be difficult, but NEVER, NEVER GIVE UP !!! That's my advise. Arie, mail4aph@chello.nl and.... sorry for mistakes I made as my normall language is Dutch.

Same. Small practical projects are great for that. I wrote my own home lighting system as a way to learn Scala. [1] Getting curious about the big ships going by San Francisco's Fort Mason led to a Twitter bot [2] and a custom protocol parser that drove me to learn all sorts of stuff. [3] Buying a cheap robot vacuum led to me learning man-in-the-middle attacks and IoT protocols. [4] Today I'm busy learning Terraform and Prometheus so I can get my various projects off a single hand-maintained server and into the cloud.

My big tip to people is to pick something that's big enough to be interesting but that you can initially cut back to something pretty small and deployable, then iterate. The ship stuff started out as a visual art piece for a robot chalkboard, but I fell back to the Twitter bot because I had bitten off too much. Having a series of near-term goals makes it very clear which specific thing I need to learn next; otherwise it's easy to drown.

[1] https://github.com/wpietri/sunrise

[2] https://twitter.com/sfships

[3] https://pypi.org/project/simpleais/

[4] https://github.com/wpietri/sucks

My main advice

1. Start easy.

It's tempting to grab a textbook or video series because it gets good reviews on Amazon or likes on YouTube. That's all good and fine, but it's more important to get a good introduction to the topic. The key here is to get a rhythm going and it's very easy to disrupt your study rhythm if you start too hard. So, much like working out, start out easy, with something you can easily grasp. Moreover, do less than you can. As they say in weightlifting, leave a couple of reps in the tank. Don't go all out as you're running a marathon, not a sprint.

2. Be consistent

The key to finishing something is to do be consistent. Intense 5-day seminars can work, but you're going to need a very good teacher and have a lot of motivation to get through it. For self-study, consistency is much more important. I would recommend somewhere between 4-10 hours a week. Anything more than that is going to burn you out and anything less and you'll forget previous lessons. 1 hour a day for me on a given subject and taking weekends off works for me. The key is to build up momentum and keep it going.

3. Power through by stepping back.

There will be sections where you're going to feel lost. You're going to feel frustrated or not know what the text or video is talking about. This is where you need to "deload" a bit. Take a week to review all the material you've learned so far and redo some of the exercises. Everyone has these and the key is to not lose momentum. Many a study has stopped due to one obstacle. The key is to step back for a bit and try again without losing the momentum you've built.

4. Remove distractions.

Not everyone has the discipline to follow these, and most of the time your brain will try very hard to distract you when you encounter a hard problem. The key is to minimize all your distractions during your study time. This means no email, social media, walks to the fridge or anything else. You start and don't stop until you've finished your hour (or 30 minutes or whatever you committed to). It's okay if you only got through 2 pages during that time as long as you didn't get distracted. Give yourself permission to stall a bit. And if this happens a few times in a row, step back and try again (see 3)

5. Get a buddy

The best way to study is with someone or some group that's studying the same thing. There are lots of forums for all of those topics that you can engage in to answer some of your questions and possibly find someone to study with. Getting some accountability is an excellent way to keep up your momentum.

Even if you are self-studying, you can and should occasionally go talk to someone who knows the subject well to help you with the question. If you don't know anyone, post the question online.

For me, practical problems always help to study.

For example, right now I'm learning Rust and it's just too much all in all.

But when I try to implement something specific it removes much of the cruft and I can focus on a handful of things.