Choosing a Course When You Only Have Six Hours a Week

Published 30 September 2024 by Desmond Whitlark

A version of this question arrives in our inbox most weeks. Somebody has found two or three courses they want, has about six hours a week, and cannot decide. Usually they are hoping we will tell them which one is best. There is no best one, but there is a decent method, and it is the same method I would use to sequence any piece of work.

Start with the thing that is currently costing you

Not the thing that would be nice to have. The thing that went badly in the last month. If you spent a week rebuilding a report because you could not defend the first version, that points at Data and Analytics. If you avoided a conversation with someone on your team for three weeks, that points at Leadership and Management and it is more urgent than the report.

People consistently choose the more interesting problem over the more expensive one. The interesting problem will still be interesting next quarter. The expensive one is charging you now.

Check the shape of your six hours

Six hours in one block is a different resource from six hours in twenty minute fragments, and courses are not equally tolerant of fragmentation. Front End Development Essentials needs unbroken stretches, because the first forty minutes of a coding session is mostly rebuilding context. Ten weeks of fragmented time will not get you through it.

By contrast, Writing That Gets Read at Work and First Ninety Days as a Manager work well in fragments, because the practice is applied to work you were doing anyway. You are not adding six hours, you are doing six hours differently.

Prefer the shorter course first

If two courses are close, take the shorter one. Finishing is a habit and momentum is real. Someone who finishes a five week course arrives at the next quarter with evidence that they can do this alongside their job. Someone who abandons a ten week course in week six arrives with the opposite.

This is why Focus and Workload Design is often the right first course even when it is not the one people came for. Five weeks, and it tends to make the next course easier, because you finish it holding hours you did not have before.

Then just ask us

Write down the thing that went badly last month, the honest shape of your available time, and the two courses you are torn between, and send it to us. We will tell you which one, and reasonably often we will tell you to wait a quarter. We would rather do that than take money for a course you are not placed to finish.