Between work and home, life is busy, so how do we make time for learning?
We’ve all heard advice on how to invest money. Money is a valuable resource that we have and we need it to live, but it is not as important as your time.
Why? Your time is limited. Whether you have 50 years or 100 years to live, you need to realize that it is a scarce commodity. Bill Gates, George Soros or Jeff Bezos, all have limited time on earth no matter how much money they have.
Let’s say you have 80 years to live on this planet. If you sleep 8 hours per day, you basically have 53 years of awake time (464,280 hours) to make an impact on this world.
How to Invest your Time?
I think we can apply the same principles for investing money that we can use for investing time for learning. In particular, I like Jim Rohn’s instruction on this topic of investing money. Start at 13 minutes to hear the best 8 minutes of financial advice for yourself and easy enough even for a child to understand.
He advises to spend only 70% of every dollar earned and with the remaining 30%, use it as follows:
- 10% – Give: find a charity or group that can help others less fortunate than yourself
- 10% – Active Capital: invest money in business enterprises that can make a profit
- 10% – Passive Capital: save your money and earn compound interest
How to Invest Your Time for Learning
Now, let’s apply this same proportion to our time spent learning. If you have 40 hours per week of work, then invest 4 hours in each of these three learning activities in addition to your 40 hours of work. These additional 12 hours of learning will impact your life and others in a positive way:
- 10% – Teach Others: find someone that can you can teach about the things you have learned. Be a mentor.
- 10% – Future Training: invest in training that is outside of your job, but for which you see potential growth in the future. As an example, you might be in HR, but you see a trend in Data Science. Learn about Data Science. Earn badges on Data Science. Read my blog post on “How to get a Data Science Job”.
- 10% – NOW Training: invest in training that directly benefits your job. You will receive compound interest on this as your training builds on previous training, making you more valuable to your employer.
Invest in Learning 2 hours per day
So, with this plan, it will require you to work 40 hours per week but invest 12 hours per week in others and yourself. You can do this by scheduling 2 hours per day for 6 days per week. Take a break one day per week. I like to schedule one hour before my workday begins and 1 hour after my workday ends to achieve this goal, with 2 hours on Saturday (usually in the morning).
By investing just 2 hours per day in learning you will make the productive part of your whatever you have remaining of your 53 years of awake time. Let’s say your 40 years old and follow the 70-30 Plan for Learning and if you start today, that’s 19,345 hours of positive impact on yourself and on the world!
Learn with the 70-20-10 Model
With your 8 hours per week where you are investing in Learning (4 hours is spent teaching others), use the 70-20-10 Model for Learning. This model simply states that we learn in the following proportions:
- 70% of our Learning comes from Job-related experiences. This is often called self-directed learning. Learning what you need to be successful in your job at the moment of need – aka “Just in time training”.
- 20% of our Learning comes from Interactions with others.
- 10% of our Learning comes from Formal Structured Training.
As you can see, it’s super important to connect with others to maximize your learning.
Learning from others is even more important as you read about the OSF Model for Training (On-the-Job, Social, Formal) for training in our Social Internet age.
Join a Community
If you need to teach and learn from others, you will need to connect with others in a community of like-minded learners. We’d like you to join us in the Upskill Create Community.
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