

Ask HN: What to learn and where to focus your time and attention? - sidcool

I a software engineer with 9 years  of experience, mostly in Java&#x2F;Python space.  Recently I started learning C for fun.  I was beginning to enjoy it.  Then someone claimed I need to know AngularJS, so I tried that.  Suddenly in an interview I was asked if I had ever read &#x27;Clean Code&#x27; book (which I hadn&#x27;t).  Another friend said I should learn a cloud service for web  app hosting, so I delved into Google App and Compute engine.  My boss said Android is hot and I should pick it up,  I immediately installed Android studio and tried working on it.<p>Now I feel stuck and in a quagmire.  I have a problem of attention deficit and this quandary is causing me lose sleep.  I am passionate about technology and don&#x27;t mind learning anything, literally anything.  But where to focus time and efforts is something I have never ever been able to figure out.  The result is that I know very little about a lot of things (very very little), but nothing substantial about almost anything.  This is driving me crazy.  Any suggestions from anyone who faced this?
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BFay
I know the exact feeling! Sometimes I'm paralyzed by the huge amount of
choices of things I'd like to learn. It seems to carry across disciplines -
I'm passionate about music and audio, and the more I read it seems the less I
know, I start reading DSP books and then realize I've missed a lot of the math
prerequisites and try to study that, then I'll get sidetracked looking at
something like computer vision or computational geometry.

It's nice to be familiar with all of these subjects, but I fall short of
actually learning the material deeply or doing anything useful with the
knowledge.

I can't say I have great advice for you (or myself). Maybe we just need to
look at things differently - being interested in things is a good problem to
have, and having anxiety over it won't help. Also, committing on paper seems
to help me sometimes - if I can focus on just doing the things I write down, I
can get a lot done. It's like there's more time in the day when I actually
have a schedule set.

~~~
sidcool
I am trying an approach wherein I will give 2 weeks to a technology. If I find
it interesting and worth while in the first few days, I will proceed, else
will abandon for something new.

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jtfairbank
Well certainly you know quite a bit about Java / Python. I suggest setting up
a micro experiment plan to try each area of interest out, and then based on
qualitative ("I enjoyed it") and quantitative ("I have ideas to further my
interest", "I actually spent time doing this") results delve deeper.

This structured approach should allow you to try many things and pick a few to
focus on in the longer term without feeling overwhelmed.

Recommended reading: [http://privatelist.findyourdreamjob.com/what-top-
performers-...](http://privatelist.findyourdreamjob.com/what-top-performers-
know-about-passion/)

~~~
sidcool
Thanks for your kind words.

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bwe42
What helps me is to focus on finishing small projects or tasks. Whenever I
want to learn a new technology or tool, I first come up with a tiny project I
want to accomplish with that. The project has to be small and have the
appropriate level of difficulty.

That way I continue to be productive, and actually using something (instead of
just reading about it) makes it very soon obvious if I like something or not.
Then it's just a matter of following whatever interests me.

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ozuvedi
feels good to know I'm not alone. thanks for asking :)

