Ask HN: Why do we want to learn something new when we don't have time?

Possibly http://www.structuredprocrastination.com

When you're busy, perhaps you're bored with whatever you're busy with, and so your brain wants to do something creative.

Conversely, when you have free time, are you filling your free time with stimulus that take away the boredom? (e.g. browsing the web, video games, substances) If so, that's why the creativity and desire to learn are then disappearing.

When you have free time, try not allowing yourself to succumb to stimulus, and allow yourself to be bored. Then see if the desire to be creative returns.

When I'm busy with a project, the things I don't understand very well make me curious and cause me to think of things to learn/make. I recently began to combat this by keeping a list of things that would be cool to learn and/or build and referring it when I'm bored. So far its been working pretty well

Just like many things in life, its all about building that habit in the first place. The most important thing is to be fiercely disciplined when it comes to carving out dedicated time for the task. Start off small: maybe 30 minutes a week to read new articles, every week. Don’t ever miss it. When that becomes easy and part of your routine, make it 40. So forth and so on until it’s something you don’t even have to think about.

Building up your habit is a long process, and it can’t be rushed. Don’t start off too big (i.e. start off spending 8 hours on a project in one day). I mean you can, but if it feels like a drag then you’re biting off more than you can chew. Prioritize on sustainability and consistency; otherwise you’ll unconsciously tell yourself that it’s too hard and set yourself up for failure.

EDIT 1: I realize the post is more about having feeling inspired/creative vs wanting to learn, so my thoughts may not be answering OP’s original question.

EDIT 2: I think a better way to frame the question is how to bring creative ideas to reality. If that’s the primary goal, building up the habit of trying to apply our ideas is IMO really important. Otherwise, ideas will just remain ideas.

I guess it's a simple distraction to give your brain a break from monotony.

A friend of mine used to search (and share!) some really strange things on Wikipedia like stuff about Rome and Julius Caesar in middle of programming session. I think it just a way to avoid boredom when you've been doing something for some time.

As for the cure I think there is nothing wrong with small breaks. It's the big distractions which cause problems. For that a lot of things can help you keep track like an accountability partner, list of tasks broken down into small tasks, a simple spreadsheet where you mark your work times and break times, etc.

Most people find it easier to keep commitments to other people than to themselves, because they know other people are going to hold them to account for commitments they care about.

I'd recommend reading The War of Art: https://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Through-Creative-Battles/dp/1...

We always have time. It's just a matter of priorities.

Also "busy" is a relative term. Many people call themselves busy, and whether they really are busy (or productive) is a different story.

Solving real problems is often boring and or difficult. Tedious mass refactoring, fixing bugs in horribly entangled code you didn’t write, convincing groups of people they need to make a painful change now for a better future, keeping a team of engineers happy and busy.

Learning is always more fun and easy. You can read a tutorial and make progress. Even a rigorous online course is still easier than real life problems because the direction you go in is on rails. You don’t have to do that hard part of deciding what to do and why to do it; the instructor did that already.

I often see people divert their attention to busy work that’s easy to make progress on instead of the real and immediate problems. Examples would be fixing all the warnings in a large project, optimizing things that are already fast enough.

The real stars of engineering resist these tempting short term buzzes somehow .

Creativity thrives on diverse and novel combinations of inputs.

So, if all the physicists in your office play tennis, except that one guy who collects butterflies as his hobby, that one guy will have more novel ideas than possibly all the others combined. Everyone else will think more or less alike. He's the one who will be going "But what if black holes are kind of like cocoons?" -- which may make him a laughing stock, but probably no one else is making that comparison and it may be fertile ground for new and exciting discoveries.

So it's possible that being busy is when your mind is getting sufficient diverse inputs to spark new ideas and maybe you recognize they are half-baked and you need more info about X to have any hope of fleshing it out. So you wish you could delve into it.

Starting an idea file and jotting stuff down when busy, then following up later might help.

Alternately, it's a general truism that people have kind of an internal quota.

Maybe they have an internal need to read 4 hours a day. If their job involves reading 4 hours a day, they are happy and won't read much after work. If their job involves reading two hours a day, they are going to read in bed two hours a night. If their job involves reading five hours a day sometimes, they are going to start going stir crazy that last hour and want to do anything but read.

So it can be a case of "I want to do anything else, just not this. I can't stand another minute of this -- and it's going to last all week, dagnabbit."

I can concoct a couple of explanations:

1) in an environment of oppression, manipulation or negligence, where a perpetrator, manipulator, or guardian/parent realizes that a victim will come to realize the cause or shirked responsibility surrounding their injustice, the manipulator has an advantage to change your mind or subject before you realize what happened, before you can formalize a pattern or solution or worse attribution. Those who got manipulated survived less or prospered less so had less offspring. The fact that we exist means our ancestors were then probably those who had slight predispositions to not allow "business therapy" change your train of thought.

2) this is HN, so plenty of us were terminally bored in high school, where we created the habit of postponing exams and task till the very last minute (a sort of handicap move?), at which point we had little time left and started finally doing the task or study. we grew up associating a lack of time with starting to study? perhaps it's also what gives us a good idea of estimating workloads of unperformed tasks?

This is the great spirit rising inside of you. Listen to the great spirit or it will abandon you.

For me, it's because the thing I'm doing right now is boring, and doing some other project instead (a) seems more interesting by comparison and (b) lets me convince myself that I'm still being productive.

When I'm not busy, I can play a game or read a book, and those are way more entertaining than a new project, even a relatively interesting one.

I tend to have this impulse when I’m unhappy with the things keeping me busy (e.g. low value work). My mind will try to drift into new areas to create alternative work that’s more fulfilling. Ironically, my capacity for learning and creativity seems to diminish when I’m busiest while my desire for those things grows.

I call this escapism. It is the inability to be mindful and focus on what is happening in front of us right at this moment but rather distracting ourselves with thoughts of a better situation.

Better situation is relative to the situation you find yourself in. So it changes with every situation you find yourself in.

I just sacrifice sleep. A few months ago I thought it would be a great idea to audit Steven Skiena's algorithms course and see if I could implement it in JavaScript - 2 months later and a lot of sleep lost... https://www.userinterfacing.com/tag/algorithms/

Because when you imagine learning something, you probably imagine setting up a conv net on a camera to recognize your guests and say their names.

But when you start, you realize the camera was delivered to the wrong address and you spend 2 hours on the phone getting it to arrive.

When it does you realize that you can’t just use the python code but have to download some C++ patch and that the version is incompatible with your new Ubuntu LTS.

Fine, you use virtual box to use an older Ubuntu but now you have to roll back to Python 2.6 which breaks your conv net.

Or maybe you want to write a novel hoping to win major awards and be chatted up by journalists.

But after 2 pages of a pretty exciting coder’s life you aren’t even sure how to describe his mom and you’re wondering if you should start the scene at night and you’re unhappy with the corny language.

It’s the gap between the ideal done form you see and the boring work to get there.

There's an interesting summary that MIT news did of a study done in 2005[1] that explains habits which might be helpful.

The part I found most interesting was:

> "It is as though somehow, the brain retains a memory of the habit context, and this pattern can be triggered if the right habit cues come back," Graybiel said. "This situation is familiar to anyone who is trying to lose weight or to control a well-engrained habit. Just the sight of a piece of chocolate cake can reset all those good intentions."

> Graybiel speculates the beginning and ending spike patterns reflect the nature of a routine behavior: Once we start, we run on autopilot -- until we stop."

So this could explain a few things. One is that when you're in the mode of getting things done at work, it's easy to ride this wave into inspiration for learning. But when you're at home after work it's easy to ride that wave into distraction.

So a potential fix might be to trigger your brain with a stimulus to get back into inspiration mode. For instance, make a simple note of cool things you learned this week, month, or year, and reflect on it for a few minutes. This might kickstart you into action for learning.

1. http://news.mit.edu/2005/habit

For myself, I make creative plans when busy -- I write out my ideas, draw some sketches of what I have in mind, and then leave it all in a Trello board. Later, when I have free time, I peruse my own ideas, see which ones still look good, and do it.

Maybe it'd be useful to unpack what "busy" and "have free time" really mean. Maybe "have free time" means that you just worked very hard on something, and need down time. Or maybe it means that you're looking for a job, and feeling stressed.

Maybe "busy" means that you have lots to do, but it all bores you. Or maybe it means that your mind is fully engaged, and new ideas just naturally spin off.

I've had about five distinct careers. And at each transition, I went through a period of resisting what I was supposed to be doing. And doing something else, which seemed more interesting. And then that new thing turned into a career. Not every time, of course. There were some dead ends, and I crashed and burned a couple times. But hey, I'm still alive, as Logen says.

Spending 1 hour on learning a new subject makes you feel instantly better/improved easily since 101 stuff offers high exp/time spent ratio. If you don't have time you are probably stuck, cant progress etc. And that feeling you got from 1 hour lecture on a new subject makes you think you are making progress that you strive for on some things at least, thats how I explain it to myself.

You've read my mind. I did a 4 day week for a bit and goofed off for the extra day. I think the reason is we are overworked and really your body and mind needs a rest. Given the opportunity you want to take rest over more work.

What has helped is pacing t work, take more breaks. Chatting to colleagues socially for 10 minutes a couple of times a day for example is a break from coding that seems culturally acceptable (but sitting in your car might be seen as slacking)

The save same energy for personal projects.

Also your personal projects should be super fun. I almost gave up on one because I wanted to use a similar stack to work - typescript, web pack, npm, browserify, mocha, plugins for browserify to work with type script, npm configs, typescript configs to name a few. Glad i didnt have to set all that shit up at work!

Then I thought fuck it I'll use Elm. The generated code might be less efficient but I need to enjoy the project.

With Elm I was producing in 60 seconds and had a basic app up in a few hours.

Now I need discipline to STOP working on this project because its very enjoyable.

I'm not saying use Elm. But use and do things that are actually fun and connect you with why you enjoy this stuff. Let someone pay you to do grunt work.

Pun intended.

Freedom. It's like an escape from work. So when you're not working, you don't need an escape anymore since you get more freedom.

When I take breaks from coding I generally spend some time learning about things I'm curious about. This kind of clears my head for the next round of coding and satiates my desire to learn something new at the same time.

I guess its like Larry Page says "The only cost is opportunity cost". You've opted to do something and you feel the pain of the other options you gave up, so you yearn for them. When you aren't doing anything you still have all the options open.