The world is constantly changing and getting more complex. It is crucial to renew your skill set in order to stay competitive on the job market. This allows you to add value not only to yourself, but also to your employer. It can sometimes be challenging to find time to learn at your workplace either due to lack of time or alignment with the company targets. How do you find time to learn something new when you’re deep in the daily grind at work and come home to your family with three kids in the evening? In this article I will share with you my tips that will help you succeed.

Find your motivation to learn

Motivation is the single most important thing if you’re going to succeed in learning something new. You need to find your reason why it is worth the time and effort to set aside other things you are currently doing or would like to do, in order to focus on learning something new.

I have always had a soft spot for numbers and metrics. With the increasing amount of data that we are producing each day, makes it inevitable that we must become even better at managing data. Otherwise we wont be able learn from it effectively. These things combined with the all the fuzz that “machine learning and artificial intelligence is the new black” got my interest roughly one year ago. I decided that this is something I will focus on and learn. Regardless of my future work I firmly believe that I will benefit from this knowledge.

Find your path to success

Goal setting is a proven method that will help you achieve your aspirations. Set up a goal that you want to achieve in the future. Next plan your steps how you plan to move towards the goal. Don’t overdo the planning, it’s enough to know with certainty what your next step will be. There’s a big chance the path will change during your endeavors. Finally, write the goal and steps down. This will remind you of your targets as well as help with confirmation bias.

I set up a goal to learn machine learning. There was no specific timetable set, because I was in the middle of my masters studies by the side of my work at that point. As a first step I planned to get acquainted with the Python ecosystem (syntax, libraries, environments). This was quite easy as I am a programmer. Next I took a course on Pandas, which is a library for data structures and data analysis. Following that I wanted to learn the basic machine learning theories and took Andrew Ng’s course on Coursera. Next up I decided to familiarize with the machine libraries for Python (here and here). I’ve taken part in a couple of Kaggle competitions in order to not only take online courses. Currently I’m taking my first steps into deep learning and plan to deepen that knowledge. I’d also like to actually work on an end to end machine learning project to better learn what happens after the fit and predict functions and model evaluations.

Find the time to learn

Finding the time to learn is probably the trickiest issue to tackle if you’re like me, and are working 9 to 5 and have a house and family that needs to be taken care of every day. Despite that I’d argue that there is more time available than we’d like to think. You just need to make it visible somehow to see what’s available. Take some time to figure out how your time is spent in the evenings. How much time do you need for helping with chores at home? How much time is spent taking care of your kids and e.g. driving them to their hobbies? How much time do you use for your own hobbies? And most importantly; how much time do you spend in front of the television, phone or computer just scrolling by, but not doing anything useful?

You can budget your time as you would do with your money. What is different from budgeting money is that everyone has the same amount of time to use spend day. 24 hours. Calculate, and schedule if needed, how much time is used for essentials such as sleep, family, and other mandatory chores. Make sure that you balance this with your spouse. Maybe you can agree that he/she takes care of the essentials one day/evening and you do the same at some other timepoint? How much time do you use for your own activities and hobbies? Consider if everything is necessary or if you could leave something out in order to make time for learning. Finally, calculate how much time you waste on so called nonsense. Studies show that it is more than we probably think. Can you use those 10-15 minute slots for reading an article, watching an instructional video or making a small change/addition to your project instead of watching the latest notifications on up Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn…

Find the best way to learn

Nowadays the internet is full of freely and commercially available resources. online courses, books, articles, projects, you name it. But reading a certain book, or taking a couple of courses only take you thus far. What you want to do is mix it up and diversify your learning as much as possible.

MOOC’s (Massive open online course) are good in the sense that they give you a good overview on a certain topic or introduce you to a certain concept or software in order to get a grasp of what is is and how it can be used. After going through 4+ and counting data science related MOOC’s I’ve noticed that they start to repeat themselves and they are no longer developing my skills as they used to. I can of course diversify the learning topics, but what I’m missing out on is gaining a deeper understanding of how to apply it in practice.

To address this, try to think of ways where you can apply what you’ve learned in real world scenarios. Try to come up with your own project related to a topic of your interest. Join an online/open source project and contribute through that. Maybe there’s a local community that you can join. Take part in competitions if such are available. All these alternatives will require your brain to make new neural connections between what you already know and help you deepen your knowledge.

Challenge yourself to teach what you’ve learned. Write blog posts/articles, present certain topics to your colleagues, or why not try to explain a complex topic for your spouse, kids or your parents. Having to explain what you have learned will further tease your brain to gaining an even deeper understanding of the topic at hand!

Be kind to yourself

In the end, learning new things is supposed to be fun even it is beneficial to have a clear goal and be result oriented. If it ever stops being fun or you start to feel overwhelmed, take a break and do something else for a day or a week. Whatever helps. I believe that once something starts to feel like a chore you also learn less on the way. Without genuine interest you fail to truly grasp what you are learning. I hope the these tips will help you on your learning journey and I will go back to continue mine.

What are your best learning tips?