One of the best things about my job is that I am able to walk from work to where I live in five minutes or less. This is the pinnacle of convenience. There’s never a stressful commute and I have a ton of free time created from not spending so much of it getting to/from work. Yet another benefit is the ability to go home for lunch. Every day I come home for lunch I have around 50 minutes to do whatever. In 2017 I’m going to spend this time learning through sites like Coursera, Udacity, and Pluralsight or reading books and blogs.

I estimate that on a typical day, I’ll have 30 minutes or so of actual learning time during lunch. The remaining balance of the break will be dedicated to eating, relaxing, and preparing for the rest of the day. Over the course of the year this practice will yield 120+ hours of active study. That’s an impressive amount of time. Considering that before this practice, lunch time was mostly spent reading about the Chicago Cubs and technology news, learning is a far more practical use of my lunches.

To kick the practice off, I’m going to be taking Coursera’s Machine Learning course. From what I’ve been reading on HackerNews for the last year, Machine Learning is the hottest subject around. It seems like everyone is learning it. I might as well get in on the subject too. It’ll be a good opportunity to ease back into some Mathematical ideas and pick up some new algorithmic techniques.