12. Oct 2019 |

10,000-Hour Rule – key to success in coding?

Practice will make you better. Don’t expect it to make you perfect.

Malcolm Gladwell, the author of “Outliers” explains the key to success in any field is simply a matter of practicing a specific task that can be accomplished with 20 hours of work a week for 10 years (which makes 10 000 hours).

I started using Toggl to track the time that I spend on different tasks. It is a very good tool for this. For better reporting, I used TalTech as a client and subjects as projects. My tasks mainly include maintaining my online stores and doing work for school. So for reporting it is good to use TalTech as a client filter. This week I see that have spent 12 hours and 46 minutes on Python after school. It is Saturday at the moment so I expect it to reach 15+ hours coding weekly. At some point this week it made 10x what I have spent on a second subject in school.

Week 6 at school – most of the time it is coding after school only.

If we say, that I started coding this week, then 12.75 hours would make 0.13% of my learning path (10 000 hours). So I say, doing it feels like a lot. Like I am always in PyCharm. But thinking that professionals do it 8 hours a day which makes 40 hours a week – it is more than 3 times what I have done this week 😀

Toggl is far from… or not

Toggl is not the one to blame. Update from week 7 is that I very often forget to turn Toggl on or off. But I think, despite the gaps in tracking I got around 35 hours of independent after school work. Most of it for “Sets, relations, systems” (all Thurdsay and Friday) because I had the test on Friday evening. Python got its 14 hours this week.

Read more:

Vox, Wikipedia