Can you shed more light on doing one thing at a time? Is this about removing distractions while you're trying to learn or is this as much about picking one topic to learn at a time? IE don't try to learn to play the piano and learn to speak Chinese in parallel? My assumption is that section 1 is about the small distractions but I was also wondering if the research indicates anything for multiple courses of study in parallel.
sagefy|7 years ago
You definitely can, and probably already are, learning multiple things in parallel in the scope of weeks or months. You want to make sure you have time to commit to each of those things. You probably only have about 3-5 hours a day of full effort to expend. So I wouldn't go beyond three or so different subjects in the same overall interval.
In the moment, you want focus. If you tried to learn to play piano using scores written in Chinese as an attempt to learn both at the same time, you'd probably overwhelm yourself. In the moment, the more specific and focused you can get the better. So maybe its a specific piano technique, like arpeggios in major scales. Or the Chinese characters for colors. The more you can remove distractions and break down what you're learning into smaller parts, the faster you're going to learn both in the short term and long term.