General

Master Free Time: Plan, Learn, and Pursue Interests

A simple system to make progress on skills and hobbies: treat learning like a marathon, rotate your focus, and build momentum by showing up consistently.

Originally published on Medium: Master Your Free Time: Plan, Learn, and Pursue Your Interests

Learning is a continuous process.

It could be a musical instrument you want to learn to play or a technology skill you want to acquire to stay relevant in your profession. Learning is ongoing — there’s rarely a point where you can say, “I’ve learned this completely.”

Learning is a marathon, not a sprint.

Many skills take time. I’ve tried sprinting on learning goals and failed. For example, I once focused intensely on the fundamentals of Machine Learning, finished a course, and then immediately switched to the next “learning sprint”. As I moved on, I stopped practicing ML — and over time I became “a master of none”.

This applies to almost any skill you can’t practice daily. The moment you stop, you lose touch.

So if you’re juggling free time between passions, hobbies, and responsibilities, the question becomes:

How do you use limited free time to consistently make progress?

The power of showing up every day.

At an XConf event organized by ThoughtWorks, Kishore Nallan (Founder/CTO of Typesense) shared how consistency helped him build the product. The approach was simple: make sure you complete a tiny portion of the larger task whenever you can.

You won’t see results immediately — that’s expected. The aim is to keep showing up, and the results will follow.

Consistency is key.

Start by listing down what you want to do — skills you want to learn and tasks you want to complete.

  • Be modest.
  • Don’t overload the list.
  • Limit it to what matters most.

Example list:

  • Create a pet project to learn React
  • Take up a course to understand Large Language Models
  • Journal or write something
  • Practice keyboard

Next, allocate time to each item:

  • Create a pet project to learn React — 2 hours
  • Take up a course to understand Large Language Models — 2 hours
  • Journal or write something — 1 hour
  • Practice keyboard — 1 hour

Now, all you have to do is be consistent:

  • pick a task
  • spend the time you allocated
  • cross it out
  • move to the next one

When you complete the list, rewrite it and repeat.

There will be days you can’t do any of it (vacations, life happening). Don’t give up — restart from where you left off.

The list should only contain things that are important to you. If something is boring or unimportant, it shouldn’t be on the list in the first place.