I’m studying to become a personal trainer, next to my full-time job. The course is mostly self-study, which means nobody decides when I study except me. My way of making it work is simple: I do a little something every day and a little more on the weekend. This is what that looks like in practice.
A little every day, a bit more on the weekend
With a full-time job, I don’t have big empty blocks of time during the week. So instead of waiting for a free afternoon, I split the work in two:
- On weekdays: a short session every evening.
- On the weekend: a longer session on Saturday, where I go through the new material.
The weekly rhythm follows how the course is built. Every Friday a new content block drops, with videos and PDFs, so each week has a clear start and something specific to work through.
Saturday: the weekly content block
On Saturday I go through everything that dropped on Friday: all the videos and all the PDFs. While I do, I write a summary in my own words.
Writing the summary keeps me from passively watching. To explain something in my own words, I have to understand it first. It also gives me a short version of the week’s material that I can look back at later.
Flashcards with Claude and Anki
After the Saturday session, I give the PDFs to Claude, and it makes a document that I import into Anki. Anki turns it into flashcards.
Anki is a flashcard app built on spaced repetition: it shows the cards you struggle with more often and the ones you know less often. That means my study time goes to what I haven’t learned yet, instead of rereading what I already know.
Every day I go through the flashcards. Because new cards arrive every week and old ones keep coming back, the material stays fresh instead of fading after the test.
Every evening, right after dinner
I try to study every evening, and it usually takes about 30 minutes. I do it right after I eat dinner, so it has a fixed place in my day. I don’t have to decide when to start or find the motivation, because dinner is already the signal.
Thirty minutes is short enough that I rarely skip it, and long enough to go through my flashcards and keep up.
What it does for me
This routine means I never need a big chunk of free time to make progress. Each week has the same shape: new material on Friday, a longer session on Saturday, a short one every evening. Because I know what’s next, studying feels like part of my week instead of one more thing on my to-do list.
It also turns a long course into small steps. I can’t finish a whole course in an evening, but I can finish today’s cards.