Hello Reader,

It’s so easy to get about 25% of the way through one and never end up completing it, or to actually make it to the end of one only to feel like you didn’t learn as much as you were hoping to.

Making the most of the content circles back to my email from last week where I talked about how, when following tutorials or going through courses, we can fall into the trap of thinking we know how to do things that we only have a general understanding of them.

The reason I brought that up last week was that I wanted to talk about how you can make the most out of online, self-paced courses.

The plan was one single email, but it became way too long, so I'm splitting it into three.

Last week's topic was maybe the single most important thing, where we need to do more than code along with tutorials and couses.

We first need to make sure we are actively learning, rather than sitting back and being passive.

As a reminder, passive learning doesn’t only include sitting back and watching video lessons, but also includes coding along, line-by-line with a tutorial.

Once you start doing that, you'll see a lot of progress in your own learning.

Seeing progress can help build momentum, but as humans we're kind of funny, and even if we feel good about what we're doing, it can be very hard to keep things up, from going to the gym to eating better, to, well, completing online courses 😅.

There are a few things that we can do that can have a huge impact on keeping up our momentum, though.

Before we dive into this, I’m going to be framing all of this around the idea of doing a singular, online course, but everything here would apply to any sort of self-paced learning, whether it’s a more guided course or if you’re figuring out your own learning through tutorials and YouTube videos.

How long should an online course take?

As an example, let’s say you’re about to start a video-based course that has 10 hours of content.

You’re committed to putting in the work, so clearly it should take you more than 10 hours to complete.

But, how long should it take you?

At first glance, a 10-hour course sounds like something you could complete in under two days if you devoted full days to getting through it.

In reality, you should 4x-6x that number to have a decent idea of how long it might take you to go through the course.

Suddenly, it’s a whole week, to a week and a half of work, assuming you’re putting in 8-hour days… which is a lot of time to devote to learning and studying.

For some people, they might 3x it, and for others, 10x it, depending on how you like to learn, and how familiar with the topic you are, but I feel like the 4x-6x range is a good estimate.

If you get through courses a lot faster, in my opinion, you’re taking shortcuts, and importantly you aren’t making the most of the course.

And if you think 4x to 6x is a lot, I’ve even had someone tell me that if they see a 1-hour tutorial on YouTube, they’ll plan for a full day to do it, so they can make the most of it.

Understanding the time commitment required is a really important first step because it sets realistic goals for how fast we should be moving through the material.

If you think you’ll get through the material quickly, it’s easy to lose motivation when you are going slower than you expected or taking you a lot longer than you anticipated.

And when we lose motivation, we quickly get derailed and stop bothering at all.

Take breaks

If you are lucky enough to have a lot of time to devote to your learning sessions, make sure you plan for breaks.

Going through four or even eight hours of lessons in a day, once again, might make you feel like you’re making a ton of forward progress, but there is no way that you’re retaining everything you’re covering.

People often avoid breaks because we want to keep making progress (just one more line of code/lesson/example/challege etc.).

This is easily the thing I have the most trouble with, but taking short breaks helps keep us focused while we are working—one of the reasons for the popularity of things like Pomodoro timers!—and it allows for more effective learning sessions.

Not only that though, I often recommend not doing too much in one entire session either.

In most of my courses, I have parts within my courses where I tell people it’s a good spot to take a break and come back another day.

We want to have a chance to take what we’ve learned and let it settle in a bit, instead of always pushing forward all the time.

Schedule learning time

I’ll be the first to admit that this one is hard for me, but when I do it and stick to it, it’s very effective.

The busier you are, the more important this is.

If you’re able to commit 8-hours a day to learning, that’s basically all you’re doing in your day, but if you’re working full-time and have a family at home, your time is precious, and it’s easy to let things slip through the cracks.

By having time on your calendar, and sticking to doing it during those time blocks, it can really help you keep working at things consistently.

One of the biggest problems with self-paced learning is it’s easy to take a small, unplanned break, which you tell yourself will just be for one day or one week, only to last forever.

When you have limited time, consistency is so important, and this can help so much with that.

How much time to commit to learning

When I mention scheduling learning time, I’m often asked how much time to schedule.

People like the idea of scheduling but don’t know how much time they should commit to on a daily or weekly basis.

My suggestion: be very realistic with what you schedule.

If you’re starting to learn a new topic, or you’ve just bought an online course, you’re excited, and you might feel like blocking off large chunks of time.

If you’re already working a full-time job and have kids, you might block off time super early in the morning after hearing some productivity guru mention how that unlocks so much more time in your day.

But unless you’re already an early riser, that might be really hard to stick with once you get past that initial excitement.

Alternatively, you might put in blocks late in the day too, but studying when your tired can be really hard.

I’ve done both of these, and my personal experience is I can’t keep the early morning thing up because I don’t like going to bed before my kids, and the late blocks are hard because once the kids are finally in bed, my brain is fried and I need some downtime.

In my opinion, you’re better off being very realistic, even if that means scheduling much shorter blocks of time than you think would be effective.

30-minutes at your lunch break 3 days a week is a lot better than 4:30am every morning when you stop getting up early after two days, afterall.

You will have to carve out time from other things that you normally do, but that doesn’t mean you’ll have to take away time from when you sleep, or try to completely change your entire routine.

Set yourself up for success, and plan something sustainable for you.

🙋‍♂️ What I’ve been up to this week

A simple approach to layouts when going from design to code

In this video, instead of coding something up—though I do touch on code at one point—I look more at the thought process of breaking down a design before we start coding it up, with a big emphasis on figuring out how the organize the layout when it comes to writing the HTML.

I asked people to make this simple layout and was surprised by the results

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I asked my Discord community to create a layout based on a .jpg, and had almost 100 submissions where people used flexbox, grid, and even tables to create the layout, so I thought it’d be a fun learning opportunity to take a look at the different approaches, looking at all their strengths and weaknesses, and seeing if we can’t find a “best” approach.

:nth-child has a super-power most people don’t know

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The :nth-of-type() pseudo-selector often feels like it should behave a little differently than it does when we’re using a class.

For example, header > intro:nth-of-type(2) looks like it should select the second element inside of our header which has a class of .intro.

Instead, it selects the second element if it has the class of .intro.

In this short, I look at how we can now use :nth-child() with the new :nth-child(n of S) syntax to select elements based on their class (or whatever else we want to query for).

🔗 Other awesome stuff around from the web

Speaking of courses, Sara Soueidan has recently launched her course Practical Accessibility, and is offering 25% off through this weekend.

I purchased the course when she did an early-access presale a while back, and it is a very high-quality course from an expert in the topic.

Accessibility is one of those topics that can seem confusing at times and with a lack of good resources to help get us through that confusion.

Sara did a fantastic job with this course, looking at the big picture concepts as well as testing, and also diving into common components and exploring how to build them in accessible ways.

I don’t have an affiliate or any sort of deal with Sara to promote this, I just think it’s a really high-quality course on a topic that needs a lot more attention in general.

🏁

I hope you’ve been enjoying this series so far, and next week, I’ll give my final little bit of advice on the topic of self-paced learning to wrap up this little series.

Until then,
Kevin

P.S. Since we’ve been talking a lot about courses I might as well mention that I do have some of my own. They cover the range from beginner to advanced. Some are free, some paid, and all of them are about helping you get better at CSS. You can check them out here if you're interested.

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