One of the main reasons why many people abandon the idea of learning programming is the lack of time and energy for it. Indeed, if you want to learn to code, you’ve got to spend quite a bit of time on it, along with the according amount of your energy.
And since we all have our day already busy with many different kinds of activities, useful or not quite, it’s no surprise that it might be difficult to add to them such a huge additional learning load.
So, if you cannot allocate several productive hours a day for your coding lessons, you basically have two options.
Option #1: you can quit learning programming. Obviously, it’s not the most exciting idea, especially if you do want to become a programmer, but just have some difficulties with your learning time schedule at the moment.
Option #2: you can optimize your day in order to free up more time and energy for learning programming. Since the first option is not that interesting, let’s talk about this one in detail.
We always pay with our time twice
Whatever we do, whether it’s something useful or not, we always spend two of our most precious resources — time and energy.
The first one is completely non-renewable: once it’s spent, it’s gone forever. The second resource, thankfully, returns to us after a while, but you have to spend another chunk of time to gain it. So, basically, you pay for everything with your time twice.
That’s why even when our day consists of many small things which don’t seem to take much time, we might be actually spending a lot of time and energy on them.
So, when we set some big and time-consuming goal, like to learn programming, we must spend our time much more carefully.
Stop overpaying with your time for what is not worth it
I used to spend a lot of time and energy on choosing different computer devices and gadgets when I needed to buy something.
The situation was aggravated by the fact that I used to be an author of articles and books about computers, so I knew almost everything about CPUs, motherboards, video cards, and other computer components.
It’s very hard to be satisfied with your choice when you know that there might be a better solution which is not visible yet, but if you spend just a bit more time…
This is a typical trap. As you’re sinking into some task, your vision is narrowing, and at some point you’re totally focused on just one thing.
It’s getting so important for you that you’re practically getting obsessed with the idea of finding the best solution, like those crazy professors from books and movies.
You’ve already spent way too much time, you’re exhausted, but you must keep on searching for the best buy.
The truth is, it’s not always really worth it. In my case, it was just a computer.
The situation described above usually happens when you don’t have priorities consciously set by yourself, so your mind automatically assigns them almost randomly to anything you do, whether it’s shopping, gaming, or something else. As a result, you dedicate all of your time and energy to it, even if it doesn’t seem rational.
The right approach to unimportant things
Let’s continue with the example with the computer purchasing process.
Whether you’re a software developer or a gamer, you know the requirements your computer needs to fit. Also you have some limited budget to spend. The rational approach to the purchase of the computer would be the following.
1. Find all the components you need according to your technical requirements. The quickest way to do this is to use some big website like Amazon. You don’t need the best products, they must be just good enough.
2. Check if this set of devices fits your budget. If not — replace some components with more affordable ones. No, you don’t need to increase your budget even a little bit — that would be just a foot in the door for all of those “what-ifs” you’re trying to stay away from. You’d already decided how much you want to spend on the PC before the step number one. Nothing has changed since then.
3. Read several reviews. If there are no noticeable signs of bad quality of the products there — buy them.
That’s all. The whole process won’t take more than a few hours. Instead of days or even weeks of fruitless thinking and doubts.
Yes, it might be not the best hardware you could find. But you don’t need the best one, especially if you’re aware of the fact that what is the best today will be mediocre tomorrow, so this is the game with no way to win anyway.
Now when I need to buy a laptop, a smartphone, or something else, I just follow this algorithm and it has been proven to be perfect for me.
I don’t waste time on such insignificant things anymore. They take exactly that much they truly deserve.
Free up some space for what is important
Of course, this article is not about the best way to buy electronics. It was just an illustration to the idea that you can significantly optimize your time and, thanks to it, start moving towards important goals like learning programming, by simply stopping wasting many hours and days on really unimportant things.
Often we’re overwhelmed with tons of suchlike time-consuming routines and habits, cluttering up our life, leaving no time and energy for what really matters to us. And we live this way not because we’re good with it, we just didn’t happen to think about it.
All of 24 hours we have every day are already filled with something: our job, YouTube, Netflix, video games, etc. Every second is somehow already being used.
It’s like we have a big closet which is always 100% filled with different things, and each of them is of some importance to us, so we are reluctant to throw out any of them. At the same time, when we start learning programming, we’re trying to squeeze inside it another gigantic box with the new thing we’re very excited about right now.
Of course, it’s impossible. In order to bring something new into our life, we have to free up some space for it first, especially when we talk about such big things as programming. We cannot just add it up on top of what we already have.
Personally, when I started learning programming, I had to significantly reduce the amount of time I would spend on reading news, watching videos, and playing video games.
No, I didn’t stop completely doing any of that, and neither should you. It would be too much — even when your schedule is really tight, you still have to have some rest, and video games might be even useful as you learn programming. But I did start spending much less time on all of it.