What is a typical meta-learning day?

My first learning day & An overview of my first learning topic - design!

How did I spend my first meta-learning day?

Today is my very first meta-learning day (woohoo)! If you haven’t, subscribe to witness my progress!

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 are you learning for the next 2 weeks?

My first learning topic is design! Product design to a PM/founder feels like cooking to an average person — you can get by without knowing how to do 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!

Btw, I can use your help!

Today is literally my first day using Figma. I kid you not, I didn’t even have Figma downloaded until this morning lol! If you are a semi-experienced designer with 30mins to spare, I’d love to schedule a call with you at the end of the week or beginning of next week to get some feedback on my progress!

Lastly!! I am so grateful for all the lovely humans who decided to subscribe and witness my learning journey! Thank y’all for the support <3