Time is a Limited Resource

There are only twenty four hours in the day. Of that much is taken up by sleeping and eating. Then there are the many things we need to do during the rest of the day, such as working, or practising a hobby, or simply taking time to chill out and relax. If we want to study music production as a serious hobby, if not as a path to something more, we have only a handful of hours per day. And if we want to learn in the long run, then we need to have a regular practice, say an hour a day. Learning music production is in many ways just another exercise in learning a musical instrument, albeit a very versatile one. Thinking about learning music production with such a mindset, we want to budget for a certain amount of regular practice, together with 'sprints' where, for a short period of time, we practise more than we could ordinarily sustain: perhaps you take a day off work and can thus spend four hours where you would ordinarily struggle to manage one.

In short, then, time is a limited finite resource, and of all the time available to you, practise and study time is an even more limited finite resource. If you spend an hour doing one thing, you cannot recover that hour to spend on something else no matter what you do. If you have only an hour to practise or study, and you spend ten minutes of that on one aspect of your study, then that is ten minutes you can't spend working on something else. So plan your practise schedule and spend your time wisely.

1. Choose what you intend to concentrate on, both from week to week, for the longer term, from day to day during each week, and from minute to minute in a practice session.
2. You should aim to spend most of your time on what you have decided to concentrate on.
3. You should also aim to spend a certain portion of time practising and revising what you learned in the past, so that memories and learning do not fade too much.
4. Anything else, you should spend as little time on as possible.

The Anything Else

The simple motto is this: Concentrate, Revise, Cheat:

1. Concentrate on one aspect (or a small number of aspects);
2. Revise what you concentrated on in the past;
3. Cheat at everything else.

By cheating, I mean:

1. If you are not studying sound design, and have not previously studied sound-design, feel free to just use presets; if you are studying sound-design, then study presets, practise creating sounds, and then cheat at everything else.
2. If you are not studying composition, then just use tunes somebody else has written. If all you need is a melody and chords, just grab them from a song, or a book like an Easy Keyboard Library book. If you are studying composition, aim to produce material like that you were using before. If you have already composed a tune in the past, just use that again and again. If it is not the focus of your practice, then all that matters is that it gives you material to practise with.
3. If you are practising arrangement, feel free to use construction kits, and samples and loops from sample packs. To practise arrangement, you need stuff to arrange, and you don't want to expend any more time making that stuff to arrange than you need to.
4. If you are practising mixing, aim to start with something to mix. You want to do the mixing tasks, like EQ, compression, setting levels, and such, as intensively as possible, so you don't want to be spending 90% of your practice time making tracks to mix, and then only have 10% of your practice time left to actually practise mixing.

And so it goes on. If you cheat at what you are aiming to learn, you cheat yourself. If you cheat at anything else, and in so doing it helps you learn what you are aiming to learn, it's not really cheating.