How did I spend my first meta-learning day?

Today is my very first meta-learning day (woohoo)!

As an obsessive PM in my personal life, I decided to spend a little time designing a typical meta-learning day before jumping straight into my first learning topic.

I have 3 structural goals for any typical meta-learning day:

• Wake up before 9 am
• 6 hours of deep focus time
  • including time for learning & creating & getting feedback
  • including reflections & writing substack updates
  • NOT including any operational tasks (reply to emails, messages, running errands, time tracking, etc)
• Exercise 30-60 minutes

Why only work 6 hours? Because over time, I discovered that I become less mentally sharp and less emotionally engaged if I make myself focus for longer in a day. However, I am very productive when I focus, so I actually get more done than lots of folks who claim to work 10-hour days. I will write more about focusing tips and habit experiments I’ve been running on myself in a post later :)

It’s really easy to feel like I can do anything because I am not coerced by any deadlines. I decided to implement 3 mechanisms to ensure I don’t waste time:

• Daily planning: Create a rough schedule for the day and list my learning goals

• Time tracking: Log & categorize time spent throughout the day down to every 10 - 15 minutes. I am still figuring out whether I’ll like time tracking because it used to make me feel too pressured all the time. But here’s my attempt today:

• Accountability check-in: Today, I set up a recurring 15mins 1:1 at end of the day every weekday with my accountability partner (a lovely friend of mine!). The call is used to

  • go over today's plan completion & time tracking
  • discuss any concerns & take any advice

  I am proud of this real-life implementation of James Clear’s advice on habit contracting in Atomic Habits:

  “An accountability partner can create an immediate cost to inaction. We care deeply about what others think of us, and we do not want others to have a lesser opinion of us.”

But what did you learn today?

Yup, my first learning topic that will take around 2 weeks is design! Product design feels like an essential skill no matter if I want to be a PM or work on my own thing. It feels like cooking to me — people can get by without knowing how to cook it but it’d be costly and inconvenient at times. Following the legendary Brandon’s (@brndnwll) advice, I will be following Students Who Design’s awesome course, starting with Figma Week - recreate 2-3 pixel-perfect screens of my favorite app Notion! I am hoping to also do some feature brainstorming and mock-up a feature I’d want on Notion mobile. My syllabus for design is really simple because I expect most learning to happen while I figure things out by jumping straight to artifacts creation!

I can use your help!