It's all a balancing act

I'm back on the civilization

Hello again, friend.

Welcome to the mid-July edition.

Sorry for sending it one day later. 

It didn't forget about it. Instead, I couldn't send it because I was on the countryside with my family and we lost electricity for the majority of the weekend.

Today, I'm back on the "civilization" and can now manually send it (along with other work-related tasks I have to get done).

So, here it is!

Main quest 🛡

You can probably tell what's this week's topic by the title.

When you set out to train your supercharged learning muscles with a particular project, you have to be mindful of how you distribute your time.

There needs to be enough for theory and for practice.

If you're anything like I was, you tend to overdo the "theory" part.

2012 me used to spend around 90% of the time reading, studying, and otherwise consuming content. With the rest of the time getting some practice and I thinking that I didn't have enough knowledge (yet).

But going to the other extreme is equally harmful (too much doing without knowing how).

The question then becomes...

What's an ideal ratio? 50/50? 80/20? 35/65?

What I've found over the years is that's highly dependent on the context and the skill you're developing.

For physical and "real world" skills you can do well with a (seemingly skewed) ratio of 20/80. 20% of the time learning the theory and 80% doing the practice on average. 

For more intellectual skills, it changes to about 35-40% theory and 65-60% practice. 

What's important to note here is that for the majority of cases you benefit more from taking a hands-on approach and doing rather than consuming content and doing "preparation" before the actual thing.

And for people like me, this feels scary. Like you're not prepared to go out there and perform well. Or that you're going to embarrass yourself in public, or whatever else. 

That's where the proper mindset for learning has to kick in. To push you forward even when you feel that resistance and prefer doing almost everything else except for the actual practice.

Regardless of how long you've been doing it, you'll still feel some sort of resistance. (Which is natural when we do anything new.)

Fun fact: This week while I was working on a project, I've procrastinated a few times watching videos about "UX essentials", "Figma tips & tricks", "How to make good-looking gradients" and stuff like that. 

Sure, someone can say I'm doing "necessary learning". But after a point, any extra learning won't help if I'm not doing the "actual thing" of designing the project.

So, whenever you're starting a new project or picking back up a previous one, keep in mind to have a bias for "too much practice" instead of "too much theory".

(And if you're wondering what is that project that I'm talking about... Check out the next section 😉)

Experiments 🧪

Like I've mentioned in previous weeks, I've been experimenting with UX design for that project. 

Last Friday, I had to submit a progress update. 

I'm a bit behind cause this month is getting pretty hectic for me and I only have like 2 hours at night to work on it.

But still, I've was able to come up with a working prototype redesigned by yours truly. 😆

Here's a short video where I show you how it works.

To consider 🤔

Have you ever had a situation where something unexpected happened and it gave you a wake-up call to how unprepared you are for possible unforeseen events?

Did you learn from it and applied those lessons?

---

That’s it for now.

Hope you found useful this rather short, out-of-schedule, edition.

I’ll see you next Sunday with another one.

(I’ll be out looking into alternative power supplies. If you have any recommendations, please send them my way.)

Cheers,

Juan.