I have been working the last couple days on setting up a bit more of a normal routine to my day. Freelancing can lead to daily schedules that are borderline insane. As I was working through how to spend my days better, the subject of education continued to creep up. How much time should I spend on upping my skill level? It is a fact that I am far from being the software developer I would like to be. Programming is a profession where more time can always be spent on learning more languages, frameworks and technologies. My brain seems to be hard-wired towards wanting to learn more.
The concept of going back to college, outside of financial considerations, really appeals to me. Spending all day learning and researching seems like a very fine way to spend my time. So there are some pure inclinations behind wanting to spend time educating myself about my profession. I have reached a point in life where I am not ashamed to admit, that I am in fact a nerd.
So as I spent time working through this daily scheduling, I kept finding myself coming back to the subject of education. I just wanted to find a way to schedule in good time blocks every day to learn and get my skill level to where it should be. But at the end of the day, multiple hours spent learning are probably no longer a realistic option.
Learning does not pay the bills. But it can help. There is no doubt that being more skilled makes you a more valuable and dangerous asset. So where do we distinguish between too much and enough. Education can be such a tasty way to waste time. At face value it is good. Then it becomes excessive. There are so many other tasty time wasting treats. Networking, Research, Brainstorming, Meetings. The list can be very long if we go on and on with it, but that would be a tasty time wasting treat as well.
Education is intellectual laziness. Education is safe, it’s clean, it’s sanitary, it’s also very artificial. Education teaches the mechanics, not the art, the execution. Without the art and execution nothing you learn in any class, workshop, or degree program will reap a full yield. “I am just learning”… “I am just getting started”… these are sayings that come with education that allow us to use learning as a shield for not acting, for not doing the things we really need to do to get what we want.
In the hands of many education can be the perfect shield. More research, more skills, just more of more and THEN I will get started on things. It becomes very hard for others or ourselves to pass harsh judgment on another for researching too much or time spent on learning. That is what makes this education shield so dangerous.
This education shield can remove deadlines and make success much more subjective than it should be. And with no deadlines and looser standards, then we can become very lazy. At the end of it all we can say “It didn’t work but I learned a whole lot.” When we say that, sometimes we are just hiding our laziness and distracting ourselves from the truth.
Today as I write, I am faced with two options in my own life. On one hand, I am currently learning the Laravel Framework for building websites, so I could spend all day working on that. On the other hand, I could spend some of the day prospecting and doing sales activities to find more work for myself. If I spend all day learning, no one will really say anything, and I can justify it in my eyes and yours too. At the end of the day though, I am doing all this to build software for clients, and the only way to get such projects is to go talk to people.
The best answer is spend some time on both. What that mix of time is, I really don’t know. That ventures into optimization and efficiency, which is another thought for another day. I do know one thing that if all I do in a given day is research and go through tutorials, despite what anyone would say I know I was being intellectually lazy.