
Ask HN: Coping with time anxiety while learning something new? - didizaja
How do you cope with the feeling of time anxiety when you’re learning something new?<p>I’m a college student who recently finished the semester and I’m trying to use my free time (internship was cancelled) to skill-up on a programming language I like (Python).<p>I’m working on a fun personal project in the language and every time I have to do something new, I encounter more and more in-depth information about the language and the ecosystem surrounding it. Small example: yesterday, I was looking at some Python repos on GitHub and noticed that all of the README files I saw were .rst files instead of Markdown, so I started learning about reStructuredText.<p>But when I first realized this was a markup language I was not yet familiar with, I felt this mix of dread and anxiety at having to learn something else in order to keep progressing with the project. Then, I realized I’d had a similar feeling when I was trying to implement a particular feature in my project and read through a pretty long piece of documentation to figure out how I could use the library in question to do so.<p>I generally enjoy learning new things about software, and want to be a programmer for at least part of my career, but I’m wondering if others have these kinds of feelings? I want to have a deep understanding of the things I do, but I also feel this weird pressure to just grok something “good enough” so I can move on to the next thing and keep building&#x2F;learning new stuff.
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KuriousCat
I feel this too, I would vouch for gaining in-depth expertise in a small area
at least till a point you are recognized as a well known expert in your
circles before switching to grokking mode. Gaining depth requires focused and
sustained effort and is usually more rewarding than shallow breadth.

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didizaja
Focusing in a small area is a good idea. I currently would like my area of
expertise to be Python and the tools/frameworks related to it (e.g. Django).

Part of me has an unrealistic notion of what true expertise is, I think.
Because I want to have expert-level knowledge in so many different
technologies, but I know there’s not enough time to do that.

I will figure out how to prioritize my learning so I can figure out what’s
worth the time and what else is simply grok-worthy. Thanks for your advice!

