Ah sorry only now read this part, somehow my brain skipped the last sentence and jumped into thinking you didn’t know how the pencil thingy works. Sorry!
Here it is. Read at your own risk BTW I would write all this stuff but I don’t mean to be giving advice to people in any greater way than I ma giving advice to myself. I often feel like the biggest newb around and the posts actually speak to my own deficiencies…
Anyhow, you asked for it yourself so don’t blame me!
I think if you are asking yourself this question, “how can I go about things in a better way, more efficiently”, like you are, you are already on the right track
Being here on the fastai forums you also seem to have found the best place I know off on the Internet for learning machine learning, deep learning and how to learn better in general and be a better programmer. It might seem that I am saying these things lightly but that is not the case - I do see it exactly this way.
There is one component though that you mention, that noone else can give you but you yourself. Nothing that I mention above will matter if you do not
This is something I need to focus on more myself. It is not a side dish that you eat once you know the theory and neither are those the veggies that you eat sporadically cause you know they are good for you. This is the main course. The secret ingredient. The breakfast, lunch and dinner of the folks who do awesome things (not speaking of myself here since I don’t have any claims to glory, but just listen to how Jeremy describes his own experience and what he mentions when speaking to the root of other people’s success).
So practice is what I will focus on more and more each day and at this point I don’t think that anything else is even remotely as important as practice.
I wrote this post some time ago on doing machine learning efficiently and same practices apply to practicing efficiently. There is also the whole set of ideas on how to be an efficient coder - long sessions of uninterrupted time that you devote to working on a problem (you do not need to put 80 hours into work a week, but even if you put only 10 hrs into smth, you will be exponentially better off if you do so without interruptions and in longer blocks of time - this is how the framework I use for work, Ruby on Rails, was born, out of 10 hrs a week and this seems to be the key to programmer efficiency, I am quite convinced 10 hrs of uninterrupted time > 40 hrs with interruptions), knowing your tools well, etc.