Transcription
Recently, I made a video about everything I learned in 2024. Wow! Having a full-time job and a baby, the number one comment I received was asking how.
In this video, I'm going to drop every single trick and technique I know, or at least the ones I remembered while writing this video. I'll also share how to keep up this schedule over the long term without burning out.
So first, let me show you what a typical weekday looks like. I get up around 5:00 a.m. and then start studying. Well, now I feed the baby first, but then I start studying. I study for a while, and around 9:00 a.m., it's time to go to the gym. At 11:00 a.m., it's time to go to my day job. I work from home for a company in California, so it's two hours off. Then it's family time until bed. I put my baby to bed and then hang out with my wife.
This is, you know, I play with schedules a lot, so I'm actually trying a different one right now. But this is one where I spent a lot of time this year, and it works out pretty well. It's a good thing to think about when I go through the rest of the tips and tricks.
What this looks like is, you know, two to four hours every day because life gets in the way sometimes. You actually have to do errands instead of studying, and that's the number one thing: being able to get that amount of time and then sneak in little bits of studying through other parts of time. You need to be able to keep that up for an entire year.
So how do you do that? The first thing you need to do is make sure that you have the time. Honestly, the more time you can devote to what you're trying to do, the better. I wish I could do my own projects for 12 hours a day, but you know, that's not realistic. Maybe for you, you can only get one or two hours a day, whatever your situation is. But I bet you can get more than you have now.
The first thing is sacrificing hobbies. I used to read a lot of fiction; I only read one book this year. I used to play a lot of video games; I've only played one video game since the baby was born. Yes, both of these were a long book and a long video game, but I used to do a lot more of that. So that opens up time.
I'm not saying get rid of all your hobbies. I've kept ones that I can do with family and friends. At night, I watch anime with my wife, and then on the weekend, I take one day completely off. We hang out with friends, family, or just with our own little family. You do have to have something, but a lot of your single-player hobbies are going to have to go to make time.
The other biggest thing for making time is working from home. That is because I do not spend an hour a day in my car going to work. There are huge benefits to working from an office, as well as huge benefits to working from home, and we're not going to talk about those. But the time one is a huge clear win because instead of driving, I can study whatever I want.
Next is paying money to free up time. Once you have children, this is the biggest trade-off. Children are not expensive; however, having free time with children is. We're lucky enough that we can pay some wonderful people money to watch our child, and we can pay them when I'm doing unpaid study time. If we weren't in that situation, it would be harder, and I probably wouldn't be able to get a full four hours a day in.
Finally, marrying well. If my wife didn't understand and support what I was doing, then this would be so much harder. When she met me, I was working long hours, and she understands that I'll always be the guy that I am. I'm always going to be chasing some wild project. This is actually one of the least wild projects. I mean, it's literally just studying, and I'm holding down a job while doing it.
But the fact is, a lot of people would give me a hard time for that, and my wife doesn't. I can only do this because she supports me and handles a lot of the child care, arranging the babysitting, logistics, shopping, and food prep. It is a team effort. If you're married, you need to have your wife on board if you want to take on a project like this. If you're single, you can work 16 hours a day; don't worry about it.
Okay, so you've got your study time, but what if you want to fit in even more time? There are a couple of times you can do that. The first is when you're exercising. When you're doing cardio, you can watch lectures. You can do this outside or on a treadmill; either one works.
Make sure it's good quality content. Do an actual lecture or tutorial video, not a podcast, because those are mostly a waste of time in terms of actually getting to something that you can use. When lifting weights, do not do a lecture; you will be distracted from both of them, and you're going to do a bad job on both.
What you can do is read or type out notes or send messages between sets. Recently, I've started responding to YouTube comments during my gym time, and that's freed up other time to get back to studying.
This is very specific to having a young baby, but feeding time is a great time to watch videos. Especially when they're really young, you're doing it for the 10th time a day. You don't need to look at his face every time; you can do some light math videos or something. I actually haven't done this in a while because ever since he got more active, it was harder to do it. But I may try it again and see if he's interested. He loved the moving lines in math videos, so we can give it another try.
Okay, so that's how you make the time. But even if you have 12 hours a day where you can work, how do you actually be productive for 12 hours a day? That is a whole other challenge, and part of it is just practice. You're not going to get it on your first day. It's like going to the gym; you know, if you try to deadlift 500 lbs, you're just going to break yourself.
You want to work up over time and push yourself. You have to be uncomfortable; otherwise, your ability is not going to grow. But don't be so uncomfortable that you crash and stop.
So you're practicing, trying to get your number of hours you can work in a day up. There are a lot of things you can do within a day to make that easier. The first is to switch where you go during the day. If you're sitting at one desk for 12 hours, you're going to feel chained down. That is not a good feeling.
What you're going to want to do is move around. Go to a coffee shop, go somewhere else. Have a desk at home and then a desk at work; that helps. I don't have that, but that would help. You can do different things in different places. A change of scenery will boost you for a couple more hours.
You don't have to drink coffee to go to a coffee shop. I actually have stopped drinking coffee now. Funny story: at the beginning of 2024, I had a catchphrase of "It's Always 9:00 a.m. somewhere," which meant drinking coffee at 5:00 a.m. and at 5:00 p.m. because it's always 9:00 a.m. somewhere. That actually is terrible for your health, so I only drink tea now.
But the point is, you can go to a coffee shop even if you don't drink coffee; it's just a change of scenery. Next is changing how you're sitting or standing. I have a sit-stand desk, so you know, you stand up, and you're changing your scenery just a little bit. Your body is moving, and it feels different. You get your blood flow going.
You can even add a treadmill desk. They're not real cardio; if you start doing real cardio on these, you won't be able to work. But I set mine to about one mile per hour, so I can still focus while moving my legs.
Another thing you need is the physical energy to keep going. You need at least six hours of sleep. If you get less than six, you're going to crash hard eventually. I find I work better with around seven, and a lot of people need eight. Eight is nice; I don't really need it, but everyone's different.
You also have to work out. Do cardio and weights; both are important. You're going to start feeling bad if you skip either one of them. If you don't think that's true because you haven't been doing it, then you just don't know how good you can feel when you're doing them both.
Get sun if possible. It's winter right now; I know that's hard. Especially if you're going on the lower end of the number of hours of sleep, getting a short 20-minute nap in the middle of the day really boosts the afternoon. It's the difference between having three and a half really good hours versus four mediocre hours. Three and a half is a smaller number, but it's definitely better.
Next, don't study too many things at once. You're already working a full-time job; you already have a family. There is a lot going on in your head, so you need to carve out this extra time. But you don't need to split it into a bunch of different chunks. If you've got four hours, maybe you can study two things at a time. If you've only got one hour, only do one.
Otherwise, you're going to spend so much time switching. When you sit down to study, especially if you're doing this in the afternoon after work, if you don't know what you're going to work on before you sit down, then you've already lost.
That's even more true for the little bits of time you get that aren't part of a larger study session. You need to have stuff ready if you want to be productive in those little moments of time. You need to have a playlist or something to read lined up, ideally something that you can use from your phone.
When you've got five minutes of dead time, you can just start a video or read an article. When I was doing Math Academy, I would actually do it on my phone, even though it's not meant to be used on a phone, and try to do as much as I could in my head. I remember I was at the doctor's office once, waiting for an hour, doing Math Academy. It started getting hard, so I got a paper towel and a terrible pen and just started doing derivatives in the waiting room.
The point I'm trying to make is that these are little snippets of time. They're two minutes here, five minutes there, and they add up. You know, 30 minutes over the course of a day where it's really easy to fill it with just scrolling on whatever social media app you want. If you have something that is just your default that's productive, then you're going to be a lot more likely to actually do that during those little times.
Rather than pulling out your phone and thinking, "Huh, I wonder what I should do?" You know what you should do; you have a list, and you go through it.
So that's the day-to-day productivity. But what about keeping it over a year? The first thing is to just keep doing it. You take a decent month that you know is not that impressive, and you multiply it by 12. It looks way better when you have 12 of them. Just because people are not really good at thinking about time.
You take one okay day, and what you get done in a year of these is going to be pretty good. So just be patient with yourself. Push yourself, but not to the breaking point. I mean, if you're doing self-study and you're on Twitter, you might feel like everything has to be done in two weeks. Some sense of urgency is good, but in reality, you're studying for your own benefit.
There are no hard deadlines, just long-term benefits, and you can take time off when you need it. I took time off for a couple of reasons this year beyond just the baby being born. We moved apartments, I got sick for a while, and I cut back on caffeine by 75%.
For all three of those times, I took a little bit of time off work, and then I took a much longer time off of my outside work activities. You can get back to an eight-hour day a lot faster than you can get back to a 12-hour day. I don't want to stretch the gym analogy too much, but if you push yourself too hard, you can get psychologically injured and not be able to come back to it for a while.
So give yourself a break. Give yourself time for fun with your family and your friends. Let's be realistic: you're not Elon Musk. Whatever you're doing is not important enough to divorce over. So go and spend time with your family. Just make sure you do get back to the grind eventually so you can keep up some level of intensity over the entire time.
Finally, and this should be obvious, have fun when you're studying. If you are having a bad time when you're studying, then you're not going to keep doing it. It doesn't need to be a party, and if it's too easy, you're not going to learn anything. But it should be enjoyable, of a certain type of, you know, strenuous enjoyment.
I could probably expand each of these into its own video. So if there's something you'd like to know more about, or if there's something that you feel I'm getting wrong, go ahead and let me know in the comments below.