I have a feeling we are in constant flux in the ever-evolving modern world where staying updated is integral to our personal growth. You want to watch every basketball match of your favorite team this season and catch up with new episodes of One Piece but you’ve stopped on episode 45, watch every talk, follow every new trend, learn every new possible feature, and have a normal life?
How can you possibly keep up with all of this? Short answer: you can’t.
You could say you were able to do this before, so why suddenly you can’t do it anymore? Well, things change all the time, and they change differently.
Especially in the programming realm, take web development for instance, it seems things are being delivered at an incredible pace right now, and this is for good. Just pause and imagine going back 3 or 4 years ago, how your JavaScript or CSS (especially) code was compared to what it can be today (with no extra tools!), it’s crazy how many features we have now.
So, what can you do to still be up to date without being exhausted after being bombarded with information?
Well, I start by sharing some thoughts I had when I had this feeling.
Jump to headingDon’t get trapped in the FOMO loop
It is natural to feel excited when new things come out, Gemini, GPT-4o, Blue Origin, and so on. As I started learning programming I wanted to try every new thing that came out that I found interesting which led me from countless hours experimenting to, most of the time, not applying them in real projects. It can feel very frustrating at times.
These are things that can keep you in a fear of missing out (FOMO) loop to having consume much more content than you needed to not stay “behind” or to not feel like missing something critical, when, most of the time, you’re weren’t. Remember, technology isn’t deterministic, things can still change.
You see, I needed to let things mature first and move at my own pace while not being completely disconnected from what is happening around the world.
This led me to prioritizing and filtering what kind of content I consumed frequently.
Jump to headingFilter noise
What do you mean noise ? You might ask.
In the context of this post, you can refer to noise as information that is either redundant or not entirely relevant to you at this moment. This includes any information that does not align with your interests, goals, or needs at the current time.
To manage this “noise cancellation”, I needed to essentially curate the sources of information I was typically used to consuming on a daily basis. Although this required me some amount of good discipline, once I started to do that, I could see myself having more focus on doing regular tasks and having more spare time in the end.
In the same way, each person can have a stronger learning by reading instead of watching, each one can have valid sources of information they can rely on. For me, this meant focusing on a more narrow set of authors that I really like and seeing what they were doing on their personal blog posts or podcasts, instead of seeing on social media.
Jump to headingFind your own pace
Everybody learns at different paces and sometimes in unique ways. Don’t just give up what you’re doing now to involved in a new project to use the shiny new tool XYZ. Understand the moment you’re leading to.
What helped me in my journey was to always have a clear main focus first then a list of things that I could potentially experiment with to solve challenges when needed to. This could be an algorithm, a data structure, a library or a framework.
Last but not least, make learning a continuous habit. If you feel free enough to experiment with new things you’re interested at the moment, then go ahead and try! Otherwise, write them down somewhere to explore later.
Take breaks, follow your goals, and set your eyes on the future!