How to consume a 10h course?

After watching each section of the course, can you try boiling down the course into 1-5 action items or frameworks for thinking? A 10h course is a bit too mentally intensive to memorize everything for.

Knowing the "headlines" of what to study is very powerful, as I mentioned in this Twitter post. So having a guide like Neetcode 150 is great, or some other categorization of core DSA patterns.

• When you're doing the very basics, I'd just dive in with the goal of orienting yourself with various patterns, and discovering where you're strong or weak.
• When you've made more progress, then you can selectively go through the course and be more targeted about what types of problems you're trying to tackle.

I also left an answer on the specific order of DSA here: What is a good order/study guide to study DSA?

But how do we consume a 10h long course effectively?

I would recommend consuming one topic at a time and working through Leetcode related questions at the same time. With courses, you want to make sure that you goal on "solving 30 related questions with a 90% success rate" rather than "watch all course videos".

When you start a new course, there's also a strong motivational energy to go through the material at the beginning, so I would try to leverage that as much as possible. The more time that passes where you procrastinate on the material, the more friction there will be to continue in the future.

In my experience, if you spend time reading up on a subject, it is lost time if you don't apply it immediately.

I agree with this. I've done this with courses and books where I finish the material, and I leave it alone for a week, and I totally forget everything that I consumed. The real learning magic happens is when you run into a roadblock trying to apply what you learned.

If you can also paraphrase the material into something you understand, like coming up with your own acronyms or analogies, you'll also find that the material is easier to retain.

I would also add in checkpoints to review the material in one week, one month, three months, six months because it's easier for the content to degrade in your mind over time.

Great question! My suggestion is to mirror this saying:

How do you eat an elephant?

1 bite at a time.

That 10 hour course is split up into specific themes/sections. I recommend going through each section 1 by 1, reflecting and training on each one before proceeding to the next. Don't just consume the content - Actually code up the solutions yourself in either LeetCode or Structy. To deepen learning, you can revisit the problems covered in each lesson after 2-3 days and see if you can still organically piece together the solution yourself. To me, that's what mastery is - It's when you have an intrinsic understanding of the deeper principles instead of just recanting memorized knowledge and muscle memory.

Also, don't be afraid to apply "hunt and peck" mentality. If there are some concepts that you know you're very good at, no need to go deep on them again in the course for the sake of completionism. Just check off those lessons and focus on your weaknesses.

Overall I think your instincts are good around actually trying to apply the concepts. Endless consumption is an easy way to spend a lot of time feeling good but not actually learning.