A major theme in my work is trying to find ways to learn more effectively—how do we gain skill or knowledge with less wasted time and effort? But even with a perfectly optimized studying strategy, learning requires time. Nobody becomes an expert overnight, and even reaching early levels of proficiency in new hobbies, career skills or fields of study can take a serious investment.
This raises a question: how do you find time to learn the things you want to?
In this essay, I’m sharing my approaches for finding time to devote to learning efforts. I’ll look at three different situations, as the strategies I’ve found successful differ for each:
- The full-time learner.
- The serious, part-time learner.
- The person who can only devote spare moments, inconsistently.
1. Creating a Full-Time Studying Schedule
This advice applies to students who are full-time or nearly so. Typically, this includes students enrolled in school, studying full-time for an exam or otherwise tackling an intensive training program, including people tackling intensive self-directed projects akin to some of my challenges [1].
For these people, I strongly recommend making an explicit studying timetable. This is a schedule that blocks off the hours you’re going to devote to studying to maximize your results, given the other constraints in your life.
In terms of making the schedule (not actually sticking to it) this is probably the simplest. If you’re studying full-time, you can block in a roughly full-time work schedule, but allocate your hours to studying.
That said, there are some common pitfalls:
1. Studying too much.
Few people can reliably concentrate for more than 5 to 8 hours per day, even with high motivation. Studying schedules with 12+ hours are usually fantastical—the most likely result is that you’ll end up procrastinating and wasting time, not focusing for the entire period.
2. Forgetting to include sleep, exercise, socialization and stress-relief.
Look, I get it. When you’re studying full-time for something extremely important, it can be tempting to cut some of the other aspects of your life down in order to maximize the amount you learn. And certainly, if you have a competitive exam that you’re not sure you’ll pass, you want to be focused.
But if the studying period is longer than a week or two, certain kinds of cuts are actually counterproductive. Sleep is probably the biggest one. Sleep plays a major role in memory consolidation, so a student who only gets six hours of sleep a night to squeeze in an extra two hours of study is actually undermining their performance.
Exercise is another cognitive booster, so including a little bit—15 minutes of higher-intensity activity is sufficient if you’re super busy—is a no-brainer. I would argue some amount of social contact and stress-relief are also important, particularly when your studies will span multi-month timescales.
3. Not including enough short breaks.
The amount of breaks you need is somewhat personal, and somewhat dependent on the dominant studying activity. When I was doing intensive MIT coursework [2], I found that I needed fewer breaks on lecture days than on reading days, and problem-solving days required the most.
Inserting a number of 10 to 15 minute breaks is wise. Pay attention to when you start feeling fatigued or when your focus is degrading to figure out how many breaks you need for a given activity. The best kind of breaks are short walks or, if you’re a good napper, really short naps—not social media or entertainment. Save those for after.
4. Not scheduling larger chunks of time off in the evening or weekend.
This is a matter of personal preference, obviously. But I’ve found that ensuring at least some free evening time and one day off per week tends to be optimal for me. Studying more than this is actually a net-negative for my productivity.
This constraint is somewhat weaker if you have many other obligations that keep you from studying full-time. For instance, if you work another job or have other tasks and chores that keep you occupied much of the day, evenings or weekends may be your only available time to study.
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Ultimately, studying full-time can be daunting, especially if the project isn’t one taken on out of personal interest but because of a stressful exam needed for professional advancement. However, if you approach it like a well-structured endurance event, where pacing and recovery are optimized, you’ll put yourself on a much better path for sticking with it.
2. Creating a Serious, Part-Time Studying Schedule
Studying full-time is tough, but studying part-time is arguably harder. Those who have to learn something difficult while also managing the responsibilities of a job and/or childcare face higher levels of strain with fewer hours to make progress.
However, there are good solutions here too, they simply require more planning and preparation.
The first step is to map out your mandatory commitments—times when you won’t be able to learn, such as time you’re in the office, caregiving responsibilities, etc. Remove these from your study schedule first.
Next, figure out when the largest chunks of unscheduled time exist in your calendar. For most people this will be mornings, evenings and weekends.
Then, choose a consistent studying routine that you feel would be the easiest to stick to, for the given time investment. For instance, you might decide to wake up a little earlier and study each morning from 6:00 am to 9:00 am before work. Or you might decide to stay after work and go until 8:00 pm. You might decide to study later in the evening before bed or dedicate one (or two) weekend days to the job.
All irregular time slots have trade-offs. From having attempted serious part-time learning projects in most of these slots, I can attest to some of the difficulties:
- Mornings have fewer interruptions, but they risk cutting in to sleep, particularly if you have a later chronotype [3].
- After work maintains continuity with the workday, but you tend to be more fatigued.
- Late evening can have more energy for many, but it often has a harder transition to start given you may have been taking time off for dinner.
- Weekends are perhaps the most free, but devoting them to studying can interfere with other social and family plans.
Regardless of how you schedule it, making a super consistent routine is crucial. So, if you’re allocating 15 hours per week on top of a full-time job by studying for 3 hours every morning before work, always study at those times. The repetition will make it more tolerable than if you try to study on an ad hoc timetable.
The same suggestions for exercise, sleep, stress relief and breaks for leisure also apply here, but it can be more complicated. Since you’re not studying full-time, ensuring sufficient hours is the priority rather than maximizing the efficiency of each hour.
As a result, while I tend to find studying all day and all evening to be counterproductive for a full-time student (because of the average productivity drop spread over 12+ hour days), if you work full-time and only have 3 hours to study, reliably carving out those three hours will likely do more than trying to compress those hours into 90 minutes.
Ultimately, however, all of this is constrained by what you have the capacity to sustain. If you have a full-time job, small kids and other life responsibilities, a 15-hour per week studying goal may be overly ambitious. In this case, starting with a smaller amount that you can reliably do, even if you think it’s insufficient for your goal, will be better than aiming high and failing at it.
3. Recovering spare moments of time.
So far, I’ve looked at relatively serious projects. Whether it’s full-time or part-time, you’re serious about your learning goal and your drive is high. Importantly, you’re willing to prioritize your learning efforts over other things in your life by giving them dedicated time in your schedule.
Sometimes, however, such dedication isn’t possible. You may be really keen on learning something new, but you recognize that it isn’t going to take precedence over many other things that you have to do in your life. If so, how do you maximize your available time for this kind of learning?
Generally speaking, I find that dedicating time works better than trying to learn things ad hoc. This is true even if you have a lot of intrinsic motivation to learn. This is a big reason most people learn better from in-person classes than self-paced courses—the medium of instruction isn’t vastly different, but for most people, signing up for an in-person class forces them to attend at a particular time and place—effectively upgrading them to the prior strategy.
What shifts between the serious, part-time strategy and the spare-moment strategy isn’t really the amount of time dedicated (both are part-time), it’s that the latter requires you to make a decision to do some learning activity at opportune moments throughout the day.
Unfortunately, learning is effortful, and so doing some learning activity, whether that’s reading a book, watching lecture videos or practicing a skill, will usually be an uphill climb compared to other options like playing video games or watching Netflix. In other words, even if you could *in theory* capture 5 to 10 hours per week for a learning project you’re strongly motivated to pursue, most of the time you won’t. You’ll do something easier instead.
It’s for this reason that I almost always prefer the previous strategy of dedicating time. It’s much easier to commit to something that’s higher-effort when it’s habitual than if you have to choose to engage spontaneously over and over again.
The key to success with this strategy, then, tends to be finding ways to reduce the overall effort cost of engaging in learning until you’re able to pass the effort threshold regularly. The two main ways to do this are:
- Reduce learning friction. Have your materials ready-to-go. Clearly define your next step and leave a reminder for yourself you will see immediately. Make the project always available and easy-access.
- Reduce alternative temptations. Get rid of your TV. Delete social media from your phone. Block distracting websites or even your internet access if possible.
A third option, which is quite common, but which I don’t particularly like, is to water down the learning activity so that the learning itself becomes more appealing. This is the strategy used by a lot of educational games like Duolingo and others. While there can be some value in these apps, they often produce disappointing results for the time invested, because you’re effectively cutting yourself off from the more effective, higher-effort strategies.
Combining the Approaches
A fourth option is a hybrid between a fixed studying schedule and the spontaneous engagement just discussed. I’ve used this for projects that include both learning activities that require deep focus and ones that can be engaged in quickly with low-effort.
For instance, when learning languages, I do scheduled conversation practice and textbook study to master elements of grammar. But I also do lower-effort activities, like rewatching old television shows dubbed into the language I’m learning or working through my flashcards, at random intervals during the day.
This hybrid approach can be successful if what you’re learning genuinely involves a mixture of high- and low-effort strategies. It can help you squeeze more time out of your schedule than might be possible from dedicating chunks of time alone. The key is knowing which activities are high-effort and require dedicated chunks, and not getting frustrated when you can’t squeeze them in random ten-minute intervals throughout the day.
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Ultimately, the studying schedule you end up sticking with will never be exactly the same as the one you plan for yourself. Real life involves unexpected interruptions, fatigue, motivation and other factors that prevent perfect adherence to a plan.
But I’ve never regretted seriously thinking out a studying plan. For learning projects that are difficult grinds, the schedule and pacing make a heavy burden feel like one you can carry. For learning projects that are fun and inspiring, the plan allows you to stop daydreaming and begin taking action. Either way, you’re far more likely to learn something if you start with a solid plan.