Focused Learning: The Value of Intentional Engagement

Focusing on one task at a time enhances productivity and learning effectiveness.

### The Importance of Focused Learning and Time Management
* 🎮 While watching streams on Twitch, it's essential to **remain focused and not get too distracted**, allowing time for both **work and leisure activities**.
* 🧘 The speaker believes multitasking can be detrimental to one's soul, emphasizing the value of being **fully engaged in each task**.
* 📚 By effectively managing "Duty time," which includes commuting and chores, the speaker finds opportunities for learning, claiming they can convert **2.5 hours of this time into at least 1 hour of focused learning daily**.
* 🗒 They advocate for **intentionality in learning**, suggesting it should align with one's **long-term goals** rather than just supplementing current job tasks.
* 🔄 The speaker avoids continuous consumption, preferring to **engage deeply with activities**, whether it's cooking or reading, to **enhance enjoyment and effectiveness**.
* 🚦 They recommend practicing listening to audio at increased speeds to **maximize learning efficiency**, suggesting a gradual increase of **0.1 every month**.
* 🛠 Investing in the right tools, such as a **smart tablet and quality headphones**, is crucial for optimizing the use of duty time for learning.
* 🧘 Ultimately, the speaker believes that **focused time spent on singular tasks** leads to **greater productivity and fulfillment**, contrasting with the modern culture of **constant distraction**.

how to find time after work. Hey, you can say hi YouTube. You can say hi YouTube. Okay, you can say hi to them. Can you, can you say please like the video, subscribe, super thanks me. My software development colleagues often ask me where do I get all the time for reading all the tech books and articles, watching conference talks, and listening to podcasts. I analyzed my consumption for November, December, and here is what I did, and that's only Tech-rated content. All right, I bet a lot of you are getting excited right now. Also, I do want to notice something. You guys at this point get your Tech articles by listening to me read the tech articles. Hi YouTube, subscribe. Yeah, thank you, thank you for saying that. That's facts. Uh, listen to seven podcast episodes, five hours listened to a half of an audio book, got them. I got a half, and I actually have three qus of an audio book done. Actually, I only have like two hours left of Dune book two. Uh, watch six EP, uh, videos, uh, talks from, uh, some conferences, six hours.

read three books 12 hours. What are you reading, like a children's book? What kind of book can you read in four hours? Uh, read plenty of articles on the internet and offline medium. Okay, well, come on medium, come on. I paid for medium, okay? I paid for medium just to be the most disappointed person in that, you know, of right speed reading. Well, that's 60 hours for two months, so that seems huge, and 30 hours per month seems reasonable, which means around 7 hours per week seems doable in one hour per day. That sounds easy. That's 1 hour per day that it has to be available for learning. Wait a minute, should I sacrifice one hour of my precious spare time for learning things that I need at work? No way. Uh, I hear this argument all the time. I hear it all the time, and I do want to just throw in something a little bit here, which is that you shouldn't look at it this way in general. If this is your thought, if this is how you think of it.

When you hear this statement, I want you to do a little reorienting here. It's not about what you need for work in the moment. I want you to work and learn things in which is in the area you want to be in, right? That you want to be an expert in something that you want to take a lot of time in and be able to do that for a decade-long experience, right? And so, you shouldn't look at learning as something that only complements what you're doing at your job right now. It should be where you want to be, right? Keep pushing towards that one thing, and then it doesn't matter about your current job. It matters about where you're going to be, and it just makes learning ten times more exciting, right? It just does. You don't have to because you don't. You need that time for writing blog posts, coding, and to prepare conference docs. It's not free time, AKA time where I can do what I want for parents' care and play with the children. It's time between working.

working hours, free time, and sleeping time. Let's call it Duty time. Isn't there a better term for that? Duty time. I'm not sure. Duty time is the time that we have spent for going to work, purchasing food, cooking dinner, going to sleep, and so on. All activities that we do have to do besides your primary work. Okay, yeah, life responsibilities. Okay, the trick is to refine some of the duty time for learning time. Okay, for example, commuting every day 2 by 45 minutes to my workplace and back home, dude, right then and there, right here. You know what you should also consider doing? Leave the Bay Area. Okay, Walnut Creek ain't worth the commute into San Francisco. Okay, ain't no way. Dude, commuting is nuts. Okay, the fact that we built a life around everybody living in the exact same city or city superplex where they just commute all day is just insane. When I was living in the Bay Area, I tried to move as close as I could to my job. I was like 15 to 18.

minutes away, and I was considered like a super short commute. It was just the worst. Even those 15 to 20 minutes, depending on sometimes traffic got real bad, it was like 22 minutes. Even with that, it was such an emotional drain. It was so bad. Sure, I'd listen to podcasts and all that crap, but still, I hated it. 5 minutes to get to the train station with my bike, 10 minutes to wait for the connecting trains, 25 minutes on the trains, 15 minutes to get from the train to my working place and vice versa. That alone makes 90 minutes of Duty time per day or 80 almost freely available learning time. I don't like listening to podcasts while I'm riding my bike, which makes 10 minutes a day that I can't use. Okay, safety purposes. I like it. I also love cooking, but I also have to clean up the kitchen afterwards. Let's say that takes me 40 minutes, 40 minutes of Duty time, 40 minutes to, uh, 40 minutes.

time for watching videos of conference talks. Uh, you know, I always have a hard time mixing activities, you know what I mean? And what I mean by mixing activities is that you can really only get the most out of something if you're engaged, right? Uh, there's a whole thing that's kind of going on with this part, like if you love cooking, you should do the cookings, you know what I mean? There's something about taking and constantly splitting up our time to always maximize it that I think kind of robs you of the joy of the activity you're doing and really what you get out of it, right? Like, I love, uh, I really want, well, actually, something I really want to do is get really good at grilling. And so when I do grillings, like, I turn off everything. I don't look at anything. It's about just being in that one moment, doing that one thing super, super well, right? And it's just, you know, griller confirmed. I love the idea of grilling, right? I want to be that dude.

mult I think multitasking is just. I honestly think it's bad for your soul. I think it's really, really like it's something you got to be careful of. Um, there's something about being engaged in the thing you're doing that's really good. Uh, if I want to, I read in the evening, okay? That's free time, so it doesn't count. Or listening to an Audi book to calm down. Uh, or before falling asleep. Yes, that's Duty time. See, it's this constant like trying to get everything out of stuff. Uh, that gives me easily another 30 minutes per day. I can easily transform 2.5 hours of Duty time per day that I can use for at least 1 hour of learning time. I don't even have to use half of the available time. That's good because I'm not good at listening while I cope vegetables with a sharp knife. I'm not sure what cope vegetables means. I'm not sure what this phrase means, but it seems exciting. I think it

also depends on the right tools for using duty time efficiently. For example, I can't do any housekeeping fully capable or with a stationary desktop PC, so I've invested some money in optimizing my media consumption. A smart tablet, Dell Venue 8 Pro, for watching talks while working in the kitchen and traveling by train. Luckily, a few sites allow you to download videos offline for viewing. A smartphone with plenty of storage, okay, two, because one for the spare if the other one is charging. Bluetooth headphones, Philips SB4000, for high-quality, interruption-free listening. What is this, wired headphones with good noise shielding? All right, Bluetooth, some Bluetooth. All right, if I'm on the move, I mostly use my smartphone and wired earphones. At home, it depends if kids are around. While I'm doing work, I use the headset and bone conduction headphones. What the hell is bone conduction? Otherwise, headsets. I also think it doesn't matter if you're 100% concentrated on all the stuff you

consume this way. You're always getting key facts or main ideas. It's really important information will be spared to be consumed in my free time anyways because it's worthwhile for important stuff. I write down notes in a notebook that I have almost always on me. These notes will be, uh, will be hopefully featured in some upcoming blog posts. Um, I don't know, so I take a really, really, really, really different approach to this. I'm going to give you kind of my approach right after this last sentence, and I think it's different. There's plenty of time out there that wants to be, uh, that wants to be spent well. Update 2023. I still do, uh, do it this way and can keep up with the news and it and more. What I would now recommend, practice listening to audio in at least twice the speed as the original to get used to that. Increase the speed by 0.1 every month. Okay, so I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm going to go with two things. Okay, I'm going to go

with the philosophical thing, and I'm going to go with the practical thing. Number one, philosophically, there's definitely a heavy tone of consumerism in here, in the sense that it's just like a constant consumption. The point is to constantly be consuming something at all points, like you're just nonstop, like life gluttony. And so, I do think that there is something very worrisome about that in general. I've even been trying to practice not listening to anything and just being okay with silence, right? Like, constantly trying to be intentional in the thing I am doing. And so, the constant consumption can lead you into this life of constantly needing consumption, right? You kind of almost develop a dependency on consuming itself. All forms of consumption are, in some sense, an addictive trait, right? No matter how much you don't want to agree with that, that's fine. I don't care. This is my take, not your take. But I think that there's some high level of something in there. It's like a stimulus.

addiction, yeah, exactly. Um, but second, like, more practical purpose thing. I have been trying to do the opposite of what's being said here. Instead of just constantly maximizing every fractional second, everything, doing something for good portions of the day, I will do a singular activity with all might and strength, and I refuse myself to kind of go off the rails. Even when I'm waiting for CI, CI is what's it called, takes two minutes. I will watch logs. I try not to let myself become distracted, and if I have something to program as I'm watching the logs go, I go back and program that thing, right? So that my way, my next run, because right now I'm doing some CI work, right? I'm just like doing the thing. I'm not going on Twitter while it's building. I'm not changing my YouTube list while I'm doing. I'm not listening to Great Asmin Gold takes while I'm doing it. We're not listening to Kit Boga scam the scammers. I'm just doing the thing while I do it.

and I find that by doing that for like 4 hours a day, it's equivalent to doing other things for 8 hours a day, which opens up a huge amount of time to then do also focused learning, you know what I mean. So, that way, I can do super focused learning on something else. Now, when I'm doing something that's really boring and I don't care, and I'm just fine, and I want, like, I usually set aside my morning times to listen to podcasts and stuff while just doing some basic work and kind of just adjusting things, then I'll do that. I have, like, my kind of mixed area to get caught on stuff, and then my focus time to really be successful at stuff. And so, my focus time comes afterwards, usually later in the day. It helps me, it makes me feel more, I think, awake and everything. So, for like the last four hours of work, I'm very focused. Then, after that, I go really focused with just the kids and the wife, and then I want to focus on dinner and

cleaning up, and then I focus like I just focus on one thing at a time. And then I sit down with my kids and read them 45 minutes of Wheel of Time book four right now. And then I just kind of keep on doing this, like a very high-focused, no-mindless approach. And that's that. So there you go. It's just something I've been thinking of, which is almost the opposite of this article. And I feel like I accomplish all the things he accomplishes. I've read four books in the last year, but the books were 500-600 pages long, you know what I mean? So it's like a different approach to life, I would say. I don't know. I'm not convinced continuous consumption is good, but I am convinced that being focused on time is good, you know, like just doing the thing. I don't know. I feel like you'll use less time. This is why I never, uh, never ever listen to music while I'm working. I find myself annoyed that any of my brain

Cycles are going to uh the music and working interesting. Yeah, I've been turning off music a lot lately too. Uh, do you do audiobooks? I have done a lot of audiobooks, yes. Um, during, I like, I said, I have that morning to kind of, I call it distracted time. It's an intentional distracted time. It's where I just listen to things and kind of just like, just do these tasks that I know I have to do that are just, they feel very brainless, right? Uh, anyways, I do music but no lyrics. Uh, trying to C right now. Would you please keep it down a little bit? Absolutely. Uh, the brain needs downtime. Let's see, I do some of my best thinking, don't laugh, in the bathroom. Uh, especially when showering. Yeah, showering really helps because you, so the reason why that, the reason why that happens is you've developed a habit in the shower of not being able to consume, and you actually just unlock your brain's ability to do thinking. I know this sounds really weird, but that's

what I mean. That's what most of the world was like. I do think that that's why we see some really amazing writings from over the thousands of years. Things that have lived for thousands of years, observations on life, stories, and all that kind of stuff because they had more time to just sit and do a thing without all the continuous distractions. I feel like we're just going to get less and less of that as time, you know, as we just have just pure constant distractions. It's tough. Do one thing, do it well, and do it until you're done. Yeah, showering is garbage collection confirmed. Yeah, that's why I do my best thinking, I feel like sometimes in the shower, 'cause it's almost like a form of meditation, you know what I mean? It's meditation because it's like I cannot do any other thing other than thinking on a singular topic. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. The name is... It's odd that you're, you know, it's kind of odd that you're

watching me on Twitch, probably while working, and I'm telling you to focus. Uh, you know, I'd really appreciate if you maybe stick around for my portion of the day and then other people's portion also. You know, you can also check out some other people, but you know, make sure you also have time to, you know, do the Thing by itself, okay? Don't get too distracted. Cool stream, thanks. See you. Um, the name is the prime J.

How To Find Time To Learn After Work | Prime Reacts

This is a place for all the things that are awesome on stream. 

ThePrimeTime

Learning should focus on the area you want to become an expert in, rather than just complementing your current job.

It's important to use "duty time" for learning, such as commuting, and to refine that time for personal growth.

Practicing audio listening at increased speeds and prioritizing life responsibilities can help create more time for learning.

Mixing activities can hinder engagement and joy, making it difficult to fully benefit from an experience.

The speaker emphasizes the importance of being present in the moment, using grilling as an example of focusing on one task.

They express frustration with the idea of sacrificing spare time for learning, suggesting that this mindset may not be the best approach.

Optimizing Duty Time with the Right Tools

Efficiently using duty time requires the right tools, such as a smart tablet for media consumption and a smartphone with ample storage.

Bluetooth headphones and wired earphones are used for high-quality listening, depending on the location and activity.

The speaker emphasizes the importance of focused work and minimizing distractions, using techniques like podcast listening during boring tasks and setting aside time for focused learning.

The text discusses the philosophical concern of consumerism and its addictive nature, leading to a dependency on constant consumption.

The author's own experience with a lengthy commute highlights the emotional drain of trying to maximize learning time.

Despite the challenges, the author analyzes their consumption of tech-related content, including podcasts, audiobooks, and conference talks, to demonstrate how they find time for learning and self-improvement.

Managing Distractions and Maximizing Focus

The speaker is trying to avoid distractions by fully committing to singular activities and not multitasking.

They have been turning off music and using audiobooks during intentional "distracted time" for brainless tasks.

The speaker also finds that showering provides downtime and helps unlock their brain's ability to think.

The Importance of Focus and Time Management

The speaker emphasizes the negative impact of multitasking on one's soul and advocates for being fully engaged in each task.

They share their own approach to time management, using duty time for learning and maintaining a high-focused, single-tasking method.

The speaker believes that continuous consumption is not beneficial, while being focused on time and tasks leads to greater efficiency and accomplishment.