I interpret that to mean “how many pages per day”/”How many chapters per week”/”How many books per month”. If that’s correct, then I would say I could (right now) learn a subject/book a month. Like I could read Linear Algebra Done Right in less than a month and Tao’s Analysis I & II in less than two months, while doing all of the exercises.
It wasn’t exactly that, but it still a very good information.
I will try to describe it with my own experience.
When I read Nate’s post, he said that he studied 5~7 hours per day. At that time, I was logging exactly how long I was studying each day to measure how much time it took me to do some tasks related to studying to estimate how long the whole process it would take. In my case, I started the clock, and started reading. If I took a break, the clock was stopped.
However, the most productive days I had, when I was in my best humor and everything worked perfectly, I could reach around 6~7 hours. This left me wondering if he was really human to keep such high number for a long period.
When I checked somewhere else (probably some comments) he said that his study efficiency was around 30 % (not sure about the number, but something like that). The rest of the time he spent convincing himself to do it, to continue, or trying to process what he had read.
Because of that, it was an extraordinary amount, but it was not an order of magnitude higher than my effort.
I tried to do some more relaxed measure to compare with his number, but I usually took some long breaks to do something else, and I could not consider that into a study time.
When I read your post, it made me curious to know if those 3 hours would be combined into 3*30 -> 90 hours to read a book and learn a subject, or 3*eff*30 -> ~30 hours ?
edit: I mistake the numbers, the second one should also have been 30.
Yes, I put the wrong number.
I would say my average was 4 hours during almost two months. I could notice it slowly increasing, but every time I need to change to a new subject/different kind of activity (from reading a non-math book to one that requires more exercises) my time plummeted. After a few days I could increase it again.
I think it was not tiredness per se, because I did not have any problem with stopping studying and starting reading fiction or blogs. I guess it was more that I took too much information and needed to left it organize itself into my mind.
I wanted to compare the study paces because 3 hours of effective study is much more demanding than a 3 hours study slot time.
I can easily reserve 3~6 hours a day for mainly studying, if that includes taking some breaks to reply emails, or fix some small unrelated bugs. I can probably divide it into different subjects and try them for some time and eventually drop what does not work.
However, 3~6 hours of effective or pure study per day is something that would make me much more tired. In that case I would try to focus on just one thing now, while trying to work on some meta-techniques/skills to focus on long-term.
It is more a planning question to adjust how much I should focus on a subject or on a broad range of topics/bugs. But it actually is not that important.