I recently had a conversation with a coworker and friend about being overwhelmed with options when it comes to what to focus on a and spend time on in tech.

There are a host of reasons why this is a problem and all of them vary from person to person.

The Sad Realization

Thing about this quote for a minute:

I am now to the point in my short 5 year career where I realized that if I had spent that whole time mastering the things that got me into software engineering at first, I would be a master at those technologies.

Have you had this thought before? When I learned web development/software engineering I learned react, node, and JavaScript. Now, there is a difficulty inherent to knowing React that it is difficult to master React or a another library because they are always changing. It is possible and I would be much better at this point but I digress.

The technology that I really want to focus on in this case is Javascript. I started learning Javascript in 2020. The problem in tech is that you have this, what most people refer to as, “shiny object syndrome”.

This is the idea that you don’t go deep on the things you know because you are always coming across new things that you either want to learn, somebody has told you that you should learn, or there is some level of fear of missing out or being left behind if you were to not learn it.

Potential Solutions

Below are some potential solutions. This may not solve it for everyone but in todays world we need a way to focus and minimize distractions.

Find an acountability partern and/or group

Odds are that there are people close to you, either coworkers or friends, who are also trying to learn things but due to some sense of overwhelm or lack of focus they are not able to master the things they want to.

Mastery takes dedication and focused time. It takes deliberate practice for focused periods of time over a long period of time. You cannot cram in a day and be a master forever. You have to learn bit by bit and be ok that you cannot learn everything.

This kinda leads to the next ‘solution’.

Humble Yourself

You cannot learn everything today. You cannot become a master of anything in a day. We are masters of self deception. We think that we are immune to this and you see that most likely in the amount of things that you have decided to try to learn.

You get tired of learning something but that is probably a good thing. Why? Because you have reached the end of that days worth of time that you should have spent on deliberate practice.

The only website I know that builds this into your learning experience is Execute Program. Basically you choose a course, after you make it through some amount of time in the course or a certain number of lessons you are encouraged to stop and not move on until the next day. There is a whole science behind this and sleep, short term, and long term memory.

The next day when you come back to the site you will be asked to complete reviews before you move on to the next lesson.

This is a great built in check for accountability and stopping you from over doing it in terms of the things that you are learning.

But at the end of the day, you have to humble yourself and tell yourself that if you want to be good at something you have to minimize the things you are focusing on and you have to be ok with it being a slow process.

But honestly, slow is very relative. You are probably looking back after 1, 2, 3, or 5 plus years thinking if you had simply focused on a few things you would be really good at them.

But we really struggle to do this in the reverse. We know in hindsight that we should have focused and we would be better off but now that we are being instrospective we rarely turn that knowledge into wisdom, ie knowledge applied.

Wisdom would say, “I know that I am not where I could have been if I would have focused therefore I will spend the next 3-6months only learning one thing and learning that one thing really really well.”

I know it is hard with jobs and so on but I think we can also get creative here as well.

Look for ways to integrate your learning

I think everyone thinks, myself included, that the things you are learning cannot be applied to your work. Now it is hard, I will concede that. It is really hard to be in the thick of it at work but also be composed enough to try to see how to apply the things that you learned yesterday to your work today. You will not always be able to but you can look for the opportunities.

Note: This will be virtually impossible if the things that you choose to learn has no way of integrating into your work.

Do you want to learn a different language? I know I want to learn about 5 but those langauges will probably not find themselves into my day to day.

But what does your work use? What do you do day today? Is there something within that work, those languages, that you would like to get better at?

Rather than just writing code to ship something, how can you write the code to apply what you are learning? Can you explain that in your PR? Teach your coworkers?

For instance, I have been wanting to get really good with functional programming in JavaScript. This is something that could easily find itself into my day to day at work. Breaking things out into pure functions, actions, calculations, and so on.

Also, maybe there is a library that you are convinced would take your work to the next level for any number of reasons. Build one little thing with it. Show what it can do. I am the worlds worst about thinking it has to be all or nothing but the world doesn’t work that way unless you are running your own company and even then after some amount of time it will change.

Conclusion

There are probably a lot more things I could say but these are just some thoughts I have had after many years of frustration for this exact problem and seeing many others going through very similar struggles.

Pick one thing. Tell someone. Keep each other accountable. Set a date to teach what you are learning and how it can fit into your work code. Put yourself on the line in some way so that you have a reason to focus.