Learning something from scratch is hard enough at the best of times. Even that privileged time of university with its long, leisurely days it was difficult to carve out time between hangovers, procrastination and the occasional lecture to dedicate to focused study. One has the time, and one squanders it. One has no time, and one still squanders it.

Since becoming a father, I have found, to my shock and amazement that I don’t have much time to myself. My 4 hour life became a 0 hour life overnight, maybe even a -4 hour life when you consider the sleep differential. When the available study windows shrink and become more fragmented, it is imperative that you find the time to focus on study whenever you can. This means cutting out all those little distractions you thought you could get away with. You can procrastinate 2 of your 4 hours each day when you have 4, but when you have -4, those 2 procrastination hours will kill you. You have to be ruthless, and accept that there is no more downtime.

This doesn’t mean everything is hell for leather. You will burn out in days if you’re not relaxed about it. But it does mean taking every opportunity to think about study, if you can’t actually work on it. Maybe you can only sit at your desk for half an hour in the evening, but if you spend all your “downtime” thinking about it, you will still be making progress.

Context switching is a killer when trying to learn something new, and with a newborn context switching is all you do. You can’t drop that context switching so you must drop what you can, the idle context switching of twitter/podcasts/youtube etc. Focus, focus, focus. As much as you can manage.

Is this conducive to the mission? No? Then cut it out!