Are you milking the basics anon?
Are you milking the basics enough before indulging in optimization hacks? Don't tell me you are already watching videos on how to do xyz thing fast instead of focusing on basics.
First step of optimization should be to profile if you are milking the basics enough or not.
Leveling up in anything boils down to a few simple processes. I repeat simple but hard to execute - doing minimum viable research to get started, understanding the basics, doing the thing and focusing.
Minimum viable research - finding the correct resources, enough to get started with, finding a mentor or a teacher. The emphasis is to get enough to get started. This is pretty easy especially for knowledge work given we have internet and chatgpt. The basics are more or less similar across most resources plus as you progress, you will simply find better resources.
Understanding the basics - This means going over the basics multiple times, solving problems, applying them. Iterate over the basics over time. Anything you find difficult later on, it could be pointed to a misunderstanding in basics. Most advanced things are extensions of basics.
e.g let's say you are learning about Grouped Query Attention used in llama-3. To understand GQA, you need understanding of multi-head attention which needs understanding of scaled dot product attention. So if you had the basics right, understanding newer architectures is easy. You can also compare between different architectures and quickly study what has changed, what's extra over the basics.
Doing the thing - show up and do the thing for a long time or till it's complete. Doing more reinforces the basics. This is somewhat hard when you don't have momentum so avoid losing momentum once you have it. As you do it more, you form mental representations. Some reflection/meta-analysis/study can help you identify patterns in it and adjust strategy. The path of learning keeps unfolding itself as you progress.
Focus - sleep, good food, hydration & exercise. Meditation also helps a lot. Any kind of optimization is required at a very later stage. These are the basics. The basics of life. I should outline that the this para is an example of understanding and milking the basics. I commonly struggle on the sleep part.
If you want to 80/20 things, milk the basics first.