Decide what not to learn

At least, for right now.

You can learn anything, but you can’t learn everything.

Career-adjacent learning can be one of the most compelling ways to spend your time and energy. It promises open doors and Possibility, new abilities that you can use to build grand new dreams and advance yourself, and the sheer enjoyment of gaining knowledge.

It’s also bottomless and neverending.

If you start digging in to learn every interesting thing you come across, you’ll only ever glean a Wikipedia-depth summary of each topic. And if you’re working in technology, this risk is all the more tempting: there’s every day a new language, framework, process, or entire field of study promising to make the life of you and those around you somewhere from better to utterly transformed.

The only way to get to a level of depth where you can competently apply a new topic of learning is to concentrate on it to the exclusion of all that other noise. Which comes down, mostly, to deciding not to learn most things.

If you, like myself, struggle with this, a tactic: write down all the things you want to learn, are in the middle of learning, haven’t quite had time for, know you really would benefit from…you get the idea. Pick the top one. The rest of the list–especially #2 and #3!–is the stuff you absolutely must avoid at all costs. That’s not your “next” list. That’s your “DANGER” list.

You’re allowed to start on the second topic when and only when you put the first one down for at least a month.

You can tell yourself you’ll get to everything else on the list someday. Maybe you will! But if you try to do them all today, you’re not really getting to any of them.