Don’t Waste Too Much Time eLearning

This comes from a place of love. I am a lover of learning and the pursuit of knowledge. I know from personal experience that eLearning can be as addicting as TikTok. What eLearning has that TikTok consumption doesn’t is the illusion of time well-spent. Yes, it can be good to find an online class about something you wanted or needed to know; but don’t let it fool you. At a certain point, the time you spend with a module could be time wasted.

Is It Worth It?

It’s easier to determine the value of formal education because there is a higher level of commitment, a network of like-minded individuals in the field at many levels, and usually some accreditation to back up a program. However, eLearning doesn’t always have the same benefits. There are many different platforms hosted by many different organizations and individuals catering to many different learners and their needs. So how do you determine if the eLearning experience you’re looking at is worth it?

Is the subject in question important to you?

If you don’t care about what you’re learning as an adult, it’s not worth your time. Don’t waste it! Do you need this knowledge? Do you love the subject? Would you read about it over your morning coffee or during your breaks? If the answer to all or some of these is yes, keep going.

What’s the barrier to entry for this eLearning experience?

Some eLearning platforms are behind a paywall. Are you willing to pay your hard-earned money for access to this potentially secret knowledge? If the answer is yes, keep going.

Who’s hosting this eLearning experience?

Be careful you don’t fall for scam artists’ schemes to make a quick buck. Ads for “click now to join my webinar! Only for a limited time!” eLearning experiences are most often riddled with useless, self-explanatory, uninspiring information prefaced by five hours of questionable testimonials. Look for trustworthy platforms and respected voices of experts. If you found a trustworthy source for eLearning, keep going.

How much of your time are you willing to give to eLearning?

If you’re not getting paid to learn something for work, how valuable is your own time? Pretend you have a personal maintenance salary. You take an hour to cook and eat. That’s twenty bucks. Another hour to shower and get ready for bed. That’s another twenty bucks. You take two hours to rest your mind and reset it for the next day. That’s forty bucks right there. Just your nightly personal maintenance is eighty dollars you’re paying yourself. How much money are you willing to lose each evening to the pursuit of the eLearning experience in question? You’ll have to give something up. If you’ve determined that you are willing to give up some of that personal maintenance salary, keep going.

What’s the payoff at the end of this experience?

You need to ensure that you’ll be happy with what you’re left with once you finish whatever eLearning experience you’ve chosen. Is this going to give you skills you can apply to improve your portfolio? Is it going to leave you with a certificate that makes you more sought-after as an employee? Will it give you skills you need to do something yourself instead of hiring someone else to do it? Are you happy with it? If the answer is yes, keep going.

Even after determining an eLearning experience is worth it, you need to be careful not to let it suck up all your time. eLearning, like most learning, feels good, and it is possible to have too much of a good thing.

Not Getting Sucked Up in False Productivity

Try to remember what it was like having your day scheduled into dedicated blocks of time when you were a student. You took classes! One hour was dedicated to science class, the next was language arts. You didn’t take your project from science class into language arts. You set that down once the period was over and moved on to language arts. It would be a terrible use of time if you fell behind on an essay because you were working on your lab report instead. That’s no longer productive! Pretend eLearning is the same way. Give yourself a set amount of time to dedicate to the pursuit and don’t do it outside that time. You still have other things in life to attend to. If you’re eLearning while you’re supposed to be cooking dinner, you’re falling behind at cooking dinner and that’s no longer productive—even if it feels like you’re being productive because you keep blowing through modules like nobody’s business.

It would be wonderful if we could all be paid to learn all the time, but sadly we cannot, especially as adults. At certain point we have to stop ingesting information and start putting stuff out—hopefully using what we learned. Enjoy your eLearning time, but don’t let it take over your life! Too much time eLearning is ultimately the same as scrolling TikTok for hours even if it feels like a loftier pursuit.