How to learn anything, 20 hours at a time

I found this great TED talk by Josh Kaufman. Josh is a self-confessed geek who loves learning new things. He takes us from the frightening idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become expert to a more approachable one: we can become capable with just twenty hours invested.

Not just any 20 hours, of course. It's got to be twenty hours of deliberate practice, structured in an intelligent way.

1. Deconstrcut the skill
2. Learn enough to self-correct (just enough)
3. Remove practice barriers (distractions, set-up costs)
4a. Pre-commit to 20 hours of practice (is it important enough?)
4b. Practice for at least 20 hours

The first phase of learning anything is incompetence. Incompetence leads to upset and that leads to abandoning the practice before twenty hours. This structure helps you get past that. Until you've put in your 20 hours don't judge your performance. Once you have put in your 20 hours you'll be good enough to give yourself some credit.

My problems:
1. I tend to try to learn a lot more than I need. Kaufman points out that this is just a way to procrastinate.
2. I don't remove practice barriers.
3. I don't focus on the 20 hours.

Twenty hours is 40 minutes a day for 30 days.

So here's my metapractice:
1. This is a nice deconstruction of the steps in any practice
2. This is also enough for me to self-correct my own practice
3. When I practice, I need to anticipate distractions, and set up policies for dealing with them
4. I need to organize each thing I'm practicing into fixed periods (twenty, thirty or forty minutes each) and keep track of total hours and progress.

So what do I want to practice:
1. Blogging
2. Guitar
3. Keyboards
4. Spanish

We'll see what else as we go along.