Really Need More Time

28 Apr 2019

Nine Hours is Not Enough

I mentioned in my last post that Ideally I would work on one domain of knowledge for nine hours every week. Let me tell you that in preparing my last grimoire entry, I spent about as much time writing and reading. That means, no coding practice, really.

I have been reading Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware by Andy Hunt and thinking a lot about how I can learn things better. Although I feel the need to learn things quickly (which is a real need), I have not been focusing enough on learning better. What this means is that I have a lot of learning to do in order to be better at it.

When I was younger, I just picked up things that I found interesting and ignored the rest. I learned a lot by doing and not by thinking about how I was doing it. It wasn’t until I started to feel like I had missed out on something or that I was inadequate in a skill set that I started to spend a lot of time researching. In fact, research became a bad habit and a tool for procrastination. It supplanted practice completely.

When I went back to school to study art and Spanish, I would find myself studying things that were completely unrelated to what I needed to study for classes. The worst thing is that although I learned a lot about synthesizers, role-playing games, the physics of sound, etc., I never put any of that study into full practice. It was part-time effort that gave me understanding of larger concepts, and it made me felt like I knew about those things, but it did real damage: I was forgetting how to learn properly.

One of the things that I recognize was wrong is that I just read about these things or watched videos, mostly. I am sure there are statistics about how much actually gets internalized by watching and reading educational content, and I know some stuff sunk in, but not as much as I would have liked for how much time I spent looking up resources to consume.

Another issue with the habits that I developed was that I was researching distracted. If I should have been reading Spanish picaresca and instead I was looking up the history of analog synthesizers, I was not fully committed to either of these activities. I should have made time and space for each if they were that important to me.

A third issue was that when I was procrastinating through research, the bulk of my time was spent looking for more information and not necessarily reading, learning, or practicing. Any scholar will tell you that it is important to find the right resources, but that is not enough. One actually has to explore those resources fully to get the most out of them. I would get a full list of resources, and then skim through them and pick up little bits of this or that, but not get a deep understanding of what I was looking at. It was mostly a time sink.

Finally, the biggest sin committed: Not practicing what I had committed to learn. Spanish and art are practical, and I would not have graduated with as high marks as I did had I not practiced. However, that was within the confines of a structured system. Outside of school, I have not been very good at maintaining a high-level of deep study and practice.

So, back to nine hours: It’s a great place to start. The thing about spending the time that I did on my grimoire entry on React elements and components is that it was deliberate, it was focused, it utilized kinetic reinforcement (typing), and I spent time trying to structure it in such a way as to put every element into a context that could be understood. That is not to say that what I wrote was perfect, and I bet I made some mistakes in how I presented information. I also could have not understood everything correctly, but at least I have a better chance of retaining information so that when I learn that my method of thinking about what I wrote was wrong, I will be primed to learn from the mistake.

Then again, I need more time. I think nine hours of thinking and writing is a nothing to scoff at. On top of that, though, is practice. Deliberate practice utilizing the specific concepts that I write about. So, on top of nine hours, I think I should aim for daily practice of those concepts. If I can create a single page application every week with React utilizing the things that I have learned from nine hours of study, or if I can at least apply 40 minutes of practice a day focused around those nine hours of study, then I think I can learn React well and thoroughly.

I think my Giantism in 5e project might take a back seat for a while longer.

To-do:

• refactor head.html and sidebar.html
• followup with pages in root directory refactor
  • decide if they are all going to be markdown or html and stick to it
  • clean up format based on previous bullet
• get fonts figured out, including backup websafe fonts
• unset styling on links for all pages
• brainstorm future styling additions
• add content
  • React basics
    • React Elements and Components without JSX
    • React Components with JSX
    • Examples of React Components
  • React project
• Giantism in 5e
  • Add all data points
  • Define approach
  • Establish specific groups for comparing data
  • Write up one post analyzing results for each data group