The Effortless Expert: The Art of Learning

Things In Your Spare Time

www.getwsodo.com
www.getwsodo.com

Recently, I hit a plateau in my weight loss. And my trainer and I were

talking, and he said that I needed to do more cardio. Actually, what
he said is, “You need to walk more. You should be going for a walk for
30 minutes after lunch.” And to be honest, I just laughed in his face.
Look, I work from home, it’s humid outside, I am not going out of my
way to go for a walk, and do what? Just walk? I don’t like this. This is a
terrible idea. I’m not gonna do this. But he kept pushing. And, you know,
I withstood the pressure for a while. But eventually, I realized, hey, this is
important to me, so I got to figure out how to make it work.

The goal was to do more cardio. His suggestion was to walk during
lunch. And I realized I was resisting the lunchtime walk just because it
didn’t fit into my lifestyle. So I said, you know what, I’m hearing what
he’s saying over here, I don’t like his specific tactical recommendation,
but I know that we agree on the problem. So I thought, “Hmm, how else
can I implement this?”

And what I did was, I looked at my existing schedule, I looked at my

calendar, and I tried to find any opportunities where I would be going
somewhere anyway. So for example, I was taking the subway to the
gym every day, or I was taking a cab to a coffee meeting that wasn’t
actually that far away. It turns out that it would take me basically the
same time to walk, maybe 5 or 10 minutes more. That was my new rule.
If I had the time, I would walk instead of taking the subway or a taxi. In
other words, I made it convenient to walk to something I was already
going to. I didn’t try to rearrange my whole schedule.

Now, I share this story with you because you can do the same thing
when it comes to picking up new skills. Think about how many
times we put off learning new things because we think we need to
make it a priority or get really serious. We’ve all heard it: “Can’t learn
Spanish right now, can make time for it.” But notice what I do with

T H E E F F O R T L E S S E X P E R T : T H E A R T O F L E A R N I N G T H I N G S I N YO U R S PA R E T I M E 1
 The Effortless Expert: The Art of Learning
Things In Your Spare Time
www.getwsodo.com
www.getwsodo.com

that walking example. I wasn’t ready to make it a priority, so I didn’t.

It wasn’t a priority, I was honest about that, and I didn’t create time
for it. What did I do instead? I just fit it into the edges of my life, those
little moments. And those little moments actually add up. My steps
increased, 5,000 steps a day, just from walking to the gym.

So being able to fit new things into your existing schedule, it’s almost
its own special skill. So I wanna talk about how we can do this, because
each of us has tons and tons of time, I would conservatively say 60
to 90 minutes a day minimum, where we can fit new skills in without
disrupting anything else. This is a master skill. So I want to dive in.

Let’s say you wanna work out more but you can never make the time.
Super common. Well, one thing you can do is take advantage of dead
time. You know, those moments where you’d normally just be waiting
around for something. Like for me, I’m warming up my lunch in the
microwave. I used to just stand there, I would literally just go back to
my computer and kill time for two or three minutes. One of the things
I realized was, that’s three minutes. I can do 50 push-ups or 100 push-
ups in that much time. What could you squeeze into four minutes?
Oh, and by the way, if I did that just two or three times a day, that’s
10 minutes, 15 minutes maybe of daily practice. That’s over five hours
a month. Imagine how good you could get with five hours a month of
practice, just think about it. Whether it’s speaking Spanish or playing
guitar, whatever your skills are.

Another thing you can do is learn it while you’re doing something else
that doesn’t take a lot of mental energy. We call this stacking. You
can stack it on top of another activity. For example, my friend Alistair
always listens to French audio courses while he walks to work. No extra
effort, it’s literally no extra time, he’s already commuting. He’s stacking
his learning on top of his commute. That could easily add up to another

T H E E F F O R T L E S S E X P E R T : T H E A R T O F L E A R N I N G T H I N G S I N YO U R S PA R E T I M E 2
 The Effortless Expert: The Art of Learning
Things In Your Spare Time
www.getwsodo.com
www.getwsodo.com

30 minutes a day. It’s more than 10 hours a month. There are rumors
that this is how I read so many books. In the bathroom. Rumors that
have never been proven.

And as we learn from Josh Kaufman, with just 30 minutes of practice

a day, you can actually become astoundingly good in under a month.
Basically, we’re taking the things that would normally take up a bunch
of time, and we’re feeding them into our existing lives. We’re not
hunkering down, we’re not making them a priority, we’re just fitting
them into the edges of our lives. And from there, we can actually fit it in
enough to get pretty damn good.

So here’s what I want you to do. In the comments below, take one
skill from the list that you made up in the last lesson. And come up
with three ways that you can fit this skill into the edges of your life. For
example, you try to learn Spanish, you can listen to Spanish podcasts
on your commute to work. Trying to learn yoga, put your yoga mat right
out in your living room, and when you’re waiting for the water to get hot
for your coffee, boom, five minutes of yoga. Trying to become a better
copywriter? This is one that’s near and dear to me. Keep your writing
book in your bag, so whenever you have five minutes, while you’re on
the bus or you’re waiting in line at the post office, you can read it.

Leave a comment below, telling us just a couple areas of your schedule

where you can fit things in right into the edges.

T H E E F F O R T L E S S E X P E R T : T H E A R T O F L E A R N I N G T H I N G S I N YO U R S PA R E T I M E 3