The Best Mental Model for Serious Structured Learning
... is intense physical workouts.
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The best mental model for serious structured learning is probably intense physical workouts. At the core, the same fundamental principles apply.
If you want to extend your capability you have to push yourself and do so consistently. But at the same time you don’t want to bite off more than you can chew. You need to get a habit in place, work up to new skills, keep old skills fresh… they really are the same thing at a fundamental level.
Even quantitative metrics are fairly well aligned. Just spitballing some rough ballpark off the top of my head:
- 15 min/day feels like the bare minimum not to decay and move backwards in progress
- 30 min/day of intensely focused effort will have you making serious forwards progress
- 60 min/day will have you absolutely flying towards your goals
- Fatigue really starts to eat away at your productivity after 60 consecutive minutes or so
- 60-120 min/day feels like the high end for a sustainable daily pace over the long term
- 4-6 days/week feels like the sweet-spot frequency for serious progress, and at least 2-3 days/week at a bare minimum (though if you do the bare minimum then you have to double the min/day metrics to avoid decay, make serious progress, or absolutely fly)
As much as I advocate for consistently working towards your goals each day, I do think one or two built-in off days per week is generally a good idea. Don’t feel bad about taking a day off.
You can view it as a reward for a week of hard work, you can take a break without feeling guilty, it can help you avoid burnout, and if life gets in the way during the week and you miss a day, then you can make it up on an off day. This can help keep you consistently on the rails on a week-by-week basis over the long term, which is really what matters.
An off day won’t derail your habit, but an off week might, and an off month will.
Follow-Up Questions
If 2 hours seems to be the max, how do you square this with college stem majors? Surely they’re studying more than 2 hours a day?
Several thoughts:
- You can squeeze more juice out of yourself if your schedule permits the freedom to break up study into multiple sessions throughout the day.
- I don't know that typical college stem majors legitimately study more than several hours per day. Dozing off in lecture, chatting with study group friends, taking frequent meme-scrolling breaks (or unrelated reading breaks)... all of these are often lumped into self-reported study time when they really shouldn't be.
- Lots of students use low-effort (and inefficient) study techniques like rereading and highlighting instead of just sucking it up and engaging in efficient retrieval practice and problem-solving. You can go for way longer when you're using a low-effort study method (while simultaneously learning way less).
I'm curious, if people have an intellectually draining job, do those people only work "productively" for 2 hours per day or so? I struggle with a weird disconnect, where, I feel like I more or less max out after 3-4 hours of studying. What will I do in an 8 hour work day? Studying is (or, at least, should be) very cognitively taxing for the full duration. But a work day in an intellectually draining job will generally contain a variety of tasks with different levels of cognitive taxation. For instance, just now, I was working on a bugfix that was extremely cognitively taxing for about 30 minutes while I was confused about WTF is even going on, but then I realized what was going on and what needs to be done, and now it's way less taxing as I step through the code to locate the thing that needs to be fixed and implement the fix. But I decided to take a little break to respond to communications before diving back in, which is an even lower level of cognitive taxation.
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