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Can you expand a little bit more on this please? Did you gradually trained yourself to focus more?

• pryelluw 9y ago
  I developed a rather simple system called 0 to life. It focuses on achieving goals in the short, medium, and long term. The main idea is that you focus on breaking down goals (like code) in periods of six months. That way, you have enough time to try something and not lose a lot of time. It also allows for you to build on top of past success. For example, one of my goals was to write a technical book. I did not achieve it because I realized that the goal didn't fit me at that point in life. It wasn't a total loss because I learned a lot from the experience. Another goal was to release more open source code in a six month period. This is something I did by releasing three different projects. That goal also taught me a lot of valuable info that I can apply in the future. The beauty of this approach is that you dont have to focus too hard. Having 6 months means you can still enjoy life. It also allows you to pick your goals well (organize them). Say you want to learn a natural language, learn ML, and go to Japan. Rather than try and do everything as soon as possible, you'd proritize which you want to do first knowing that the others will also get done. You can now organize the goals using whatever metric you want. Which is liberating because there no longer is any pressure related to missing out. If a given goal doesnt workout, all you have to do is wait until the next 6 month period arrives to move forward. This also provides the benefit of using the time between bigger goals to try new things and not feel like you are wasting time.
• verletx64 9y ago
  Look at it this way. Let's say you're interested in, Machine Learning, Embedded Programming and VR, but you know nothing of any of them. Really it goes beyond interest, we're not merely interested, we want outcomes. In 6 months time, I want to be able to make a nice computer vision project etc. Let's say your estimates for how long each subtopic takes are 100% correct. A subtopic in itself, however, may not be very useful. It may be that you need to study perhaps 5 or 6 subtopics consecutively to be able to actually make something, or do something, or properly reason about something. Then we split your focus over three major topics - given that it takes 5 or 6 subtopics to do something useful, you find yourself in a position where you're doing quite a bit of time management, quite a lot of studying, but you're not actually able to do anything for a long time. That knowledge you're building is just there, not actually useful or satisfying. With this kind of self study, it's a bit like dieting or exercise. If you don't enjoy it, eventually, you'll stop. It might not be tomorrow, it might not be next week, but eventually, people will tend to just drop it if it's not satisfying. Learning is hard, but I don't think it's hard in the way that topics are complex, I think it's hard emotionally, because it's kind of tough being 'not good' at something, especially if you're good at similar things. It only gets harder the longer you sit in that 'not good' zone and splitting your focus forces you to sit in that zone for longer. That said, sometimes you're in a situation where having the ideal level of focus isn't possible - I certainly am in that situation. In which case, prioritisation helps manage learning. But at least one of the learning projects has to be progressing quickly, for me.