practice across timescales
I'm feeling lazy, so let me share other posters' thoughts on practice across different timescales.
Case shared one good reason to Learn a new skill in 1 hour:
You can go in one hour from being terrible to a level where people will notice you being SLIGHTLY above average. Recently I learned how to draw a realistic looking skull. Can I draw now? Nope. But I can draw a skull to which someone who didn't spend 1 hour drawing skulls will say "Neat skull, so you can draw?"
What small skill can you learn in 1 hour that can serve as a good impression or conversation starter?
Zooming out, Mason realized that one year is long:
Its kind of funny when you actually look at how much time there is in a year. There are 8760 hours in one. Thats a fucking lot of time, assume and guess 3/8ths of that is how much time I spend sleeping then thats 3285.
8760 - 3285 is 5475.
That is over 5 thousand hours I spend awake.
How do you spend your awake hours at home, work, school, and elsewhere? How well do you spend the hours where you don't have plans or extrinsic obligations?
In the middle lies Cafe Bedouin's reflection on The One-Month Knowledge Sprint: How to Read Books, Take Action, and Change Your Life:
“The basic framework I’d like to suggest is the one I used for my Foundations project: pick a defined area of improvement, and make a focused effort at improving your knowledge and behavior over one month…
I break down the process of conducting a month-long sprint into four parts:
- Choose a theme.
- Take action.
- Get books.
- Adjust based on feedback.
—Scott H. Young, “The One-Month Knowledge Sprint: How to Read Books, Take Action, and Change Your Life.” scotthyoung.com. September 2025.
Obviously, a month isn’t a great deal of time, but it can serve as a work unit and you can break your interest into month units, same as a professor might break a topic down into a semester, units, and individual lectures. Same concept applies.
Case showed how quick relative improvement can be. Mason showed the abundance of time we have to live, work, and create. Equipped with that knowledge, how can you chunk your interests into temporal units most conducive to your success?
I find Mason's realization from the end of his post poignant but possibly incomplete:
There is sooo much time to do things, as long as you look at the right scale.
Could adopting a frame of time abundance also rely on finding how much gets done and can be done across all scales?