Upskilling in Your Spare Time

This newsletter is dedicated to productivity and leadership. But it’s summer. I know a lot of people are thinking more about their vacation days than how to squeeze in an extra bit of work this time of year.

…and besides, countless studies show that disconnecting from work can improve not just your health and mental wellbeing, but also your cognitive capacity and productivity. So in a way, this week’s edition is related to productivity, too.

I’m a big believer that non-work-related activities and hobbies very much aid work-related creativity and performance, all while reducing your burnout-meter.

So this week, I wanted to shift gears a bit and talk about spare time and hobbies.

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If you’re like me, you may not have an excessive amount of spare time for hobbies or learning new skills… so it’s important to be able to learn fast.

My favourite way to learn new skills (or improve them) is to dedicate an entire weekend to learning.

When you only have one weekend and set a relatively ambitious goal for yourself, it can become a really satisfying experience.

The keys to success are:

• Set an objective: a specific thing you want to finish before the weekend’s over. It should be ambitious enough to feel rewarding but not so much so that it makes your task feel overwhelming (as that kind of defeats the purpose).
  

• Be very picky and narrow down your learning objective on the most critical elements: ask yourself what is really critical. For example, when I started learning how to do 3D modelling a few years ago, I started with focusing on just that for an entire weekend: modelling (I won’t go into detail but there’s a lot that goes into 3D beyond just “sculpting” a model).
  
  Similarly, just this weekend, I spent some time at the driving range learning how to play golf for the first time. My time there was limited so I focused on taking shots with a single club so that I could focus on improving my posture and my shot, rather than understanding the impact of various clubs.
  

• Pick your learning sources wisely: The best way to learn fast is often to have a private lesson with an experienced teacher, but that’s not always an option. Second to that, you can find a few of my favourite learning sources below.

Masterclass.com: I especially like Masterclass because of their truly world-class instructors. A course on Masterclass tends to be pretty short and high-level. But it’s also super focused on key learnings from the best in the business. That means that there’s no fluff - they don’t spend time on things that you can easily learn on your own while practicing. Just key insights and terrific production quality.

Udemy.com: In some ways, Udemy is kind of the opposite of Masterclass because anyone can be a teacher on Udemy (even me) and the courses tend to be a lot longer, going into a lot more detail.

Masterclass can give you a great motivational kick to get started, but at some point, you may want a little bit more detail. And I say that anyone can be a teacher on Udemy but the top-rated teachers really are pretty good. Production quality isn’t as good though, but that’s not a dealbreaker in my view.

Domestika.com is another great choice if you’re interested in creative upskilling, specifically. A lot of their courses are originally taught in Spanish but many of them now are dubbed in English as well.

And I know it’s very niche, but I have to mention 21-draw.com. If you’re specifically interested in learning how to draw/ illustrate, I personally don’t know anything better than 21-draw. I’ve learned a ton from them when I started relearning how to illustrate a few years ago.

… and that’s it for this week! Hope you enjoyed the light read and as always, see you next week!