How I structure my learning

The first months after you start exercising you improve regardless of how efficiently you train, just because doing anything is better than doing nothing. These are called newbie gains and they are everywhere: we are bound to make rapid progres at pretty much almost anything that we start learning deliberately, at least in the beginning. But what happens after the newbie gains are over? You need a method. And if you are an adult leading a busy life and wanting to dig deep into a new pursuit, that method better be good.

When I entered the workforce I discovered that I could not longer fit my art training and other interests within the comfortable boundaries of a weekly schedule that I was used to as a student. I find that my time/energy budget becomes more irregular and dependent on factors outside of my control the more responsibilities I acquire over time, and the trend will likely continue.

I think this is a very common problem for a lot of people, and a reason why new years resolutions are not very long lived: they are too rigid for the variable energy profile of adulthood.

Do what you can, with what you have

If I cannot control my cadence as much, measuring my success around would be disheartening. So I decided to try an alternative: focus on proportion. I will indulge on another gym analogy for this: you do not get very far if you only train the left arm and forget about the rest of the body.

Following learnings the world of exercise, I switched to trying keeping balance across my activities and building cadence only as a secondary concern. I ditched my schedule, defined what a training cycle would look like and focused on completing reps in whatever time I had available each week, tracking how many I could go through per month.

As an example, in the days of learning to draw and paint the human figure this is what a typical cycle looked like for me:

• 3 pages of quick sketches
• 1 fully rendered drawing
• 1 page of drawing from imagination
• 1 page of gouache sketches copying artists I admire
• 1 page of drawings copying artists I admire

I follow this strategy for art and many other pursuits: I set a theme, build a list of activities (rest is also an activity), set the proportions, define metrics and off I go! Every few cycles I reasses and adjust.

Sometimes cycles take a few days, while others take almost a month, depending on how crazy work and life is. But I never feel bad about it, because I can always look at my data I see I am investing in myself consistently over time. The needle is always moving.

With this mentality shift I find that I make steady progress in a balanced way in whatever pursuit I am focusing, and get less frustrated when a particular week does not go my way.