When is the best time to learn?

Is it the morning? Afternoon? Wednesdays?

When do you learn best?

When do your employees learn best?

These are questions I get asked often -so this is going to be one of my favorite newsletters to write.

I own 500+ books, been to dozens of seminars, listened to hundreds of podcasts, taken a ton of online courses, and read countless articles on various topics. I've had plenty of teachers and mentors along the way. I've learned anywhere from 3am in the morning till past midnight on random days for the 20 years.

Key word: Random.

Sometimes I would read 5 books in a week. Sometimes I go 5 months with no learning at all.

Does this sound familiar?

I then started experimenting with a theory - The 10% Training Habit. Big results started to pour in.

To answer today's question.... The best time to learn is at a consistent time daily. Lets get to the lesson.

Find a consistent "cue" to trigger a daily training habit.

Behavioral scientists say that between 40-95 percent of the actions we take on a daily basis are habitual. That number is still staggering to me. But what does habitual actually mean?

The first definition of Habit on google says "a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up".

Once we get out of school, most adults barely learn anything new. The main factor is that it isn't built into our daily schedule and habits anymore. And the adults that do continue to learn and grow themselves- typically have no system in place to be consistent.

One of the first steps of building a daily training habit is to find an existing habitual behavior that can act as your cue.

For example, I currently have two learning habits right now. As soon as I sit down at my desk in the morning (CUE), I start a 25 minute learning block before doing anything else. And as soon as I lay down in bed (CUE) I start reading for at least 25 minutes. This technique is sometimes called habit stacking.

We will get much more into the best practices of building the habit of learning in future newsletters- so for today lets just take this one piece of knowledge and immediately apply it.

ACTION TIME

1. Think of the moments throughout your day where you have a consistent behavior every day. It could be sitting down at your desk, taking a morning break, eating lunch, or a wide variety of other "habitual behaviors". Pick one on those behaviors and IMMEDIATELY start learning something after it every day for the next 4 days. Initially, I recommend starting with a smaller time block (5 minutes or less) until daily learning becomes a habit.

P.S. If you need ideas on what topics to learn for yourself, check out my previous newsletter HERE.

Thanks again for taking a few moments to read today. The ultimate goal is to help you develop a highly effective learning habit so you can then teach it to your team and your peers. I appreciate you subscribing and I'm grateful to go along this journey with you! In return, I promise to continue to provide valuable, actionable ideas twice a week without ever trying to sell you anything.

-Dan