You already have time to learn — it's between Netflix and your phone
Viktor Löfgren, who builds the indie search engine Marginalia, has a blunt answer for 'I don't have time': if you scroll your phone while Netflix half-plays across the room, you do. The catch is that the first sessions feel awful, and that is the point.
Viktor Löfgren, who runs the independent search engine Marginalia, says the time is already there: swap some phone-scrolling for 30 to 45 minutes of practice. Sessions feel bad at first; sleep, not the session, is when you actually improve.
Readers pushed back. If you're not producing errors, you're not practicing yet. And the essay never names age, which one older commenter said makes the whole thing harder every year.
The time is hiding between your phone and the TV
Viktor Löfgren, who builds the independent search engine Marginalia, has no patience for the time excuse. His essay makes the case plainly: if you scroll your phone while Netflix half-plays across the room, the hours already exist. Spend 30 to 45 minutes a day and no more, because longer sessions just bank fatigue and sloppy reps. Expect the start to feel bad. "While you practice the thing you want to learn, you will not feel good, especially not starting out," he writes, and the next day it is measurably easier. His mechanism is simple: practice only gathers the data, and "sleep is when improvements happen." The deeper payoff is psychological, a long-term project being one of the few ways to build "a sense of control over your circumstances."
'If I'm not producing errors, I'm not practicing'
The thread mostly sharpened him rather than fought him.
"adults often confuse learning with consuming material about learning… if I'm not producing errors, I'm probably not practicing yet" — one reader's test for whether you've actually started
Another commenter supplied the timeline the essay skips.
"It takes about 2-3 years of mild practice to get good enough that you'll routinely impress yourself, about 5 years to get good enough that you could do paid commissions." — a reader who took up drawing in his twenties
The hardest objection was about the calendar.
"Couldn't find a mention of age in the article… in practice, mostly harder and harder to do as time passes by." — an older reader
Underneath ran a newer anxiety: why learn anything when a device promises to do it for you.
"It's not like we've created a new abstraction layer with coding agents… How do you do that without reading code? Without writing code?" — a search engineer who blogs at softwaredoug.com
That is Löfgren's real opponent, never named in the piece: the mood that says knowledge in your own head is now optional. The thread's answer is to keep the knowledge anyway.
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