The 10–30–20–40 Rule of video tutorials!

Let me put you in the shoes of a Team Lead or Project Manager, and present a hypothetical but fairly common situation -

“You are building a new team and hired a junior front-end developer named Neha. We want all the new team members to be project ready, so it requires Neha to have a decent understanding of Reactjs which is completely new to her. Everyone agreed that completing this 50 hours course on Udemy will get the job done. However, it’s up to you to finalize how long the Team should wait before Neha is also part of the sprint and contributing.”

So.. the big question is, how long should Neha dedicate to completing this 50-hour video tutorial?

I have a system that works very well when consuming video tutorials. Later on I realised, it also helps me in accurately predicting how long, learning a new skill is going to take. Let’s use this system to answer above question.

Introducing the 10–30–20–40 rule

The rule states-

If we only watch a video tutorial then we only learn 10%. After watching, if we also practice it then we learn additional 30%. Researching about the topics in the tutorial which may not be covered properly helps us gain another 20%. Finally, making hand-written notes helps in comprehension and long term memory retention of the complete subject, adding the final 40%.

Understanding the 4 stages (Watch, Practice, Research, and Commit)

Let’s analyze the 4 stages one by one and find out what happens if Neha stops at that stage.

Watch (10%)

Let’s say Neha went through the 50 hours of tutorial without any practice, research or Notetaking. At this stage she-

• Understands the format of the course, can talk about the topics but only on a superficial level. The What’s, Where’s & Why’s might be clear but not the How’s and that’s why it's just 10% of the overall skill learning.
• Without practice and research on difficult topics, keeping up with videos would be arduous and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Neha checking her phone or taking a nap during subsequent videos.
• When it comes to actual implementation she’ll be completely lost and would revert back to the video to copy the steps or require external help.
• If we expose Neha to the stress of the sprint right after her binge-watch of the tutorial then not only we’ll make Neha’s life difficult but also the Senior Developer supervising her. It would be a bad start for Neha, eventually leading to her loss of confidence and quite possibly, interest in the project.

Conclusion: Just watching the videos and jumping into projects is a HUGE mistake for beginners and they will inevitably come back to the tutorials during development cycles with the team where things are already moving at a fast pace and it’ll be difficult to watch and re-watch the videos under pressure.

Practice (30%)

Let’s say Neha went through the complete 50 hours of tutorial with parallel practice where she followed every step mentioned in that video. Assuming she spent 2–3 hours more for every hour of tutorial then at this stage she-

• Has adequate understanding of the topic and can implement from scratch.
• Faced all the challenges involved in setting up a development environment, code organization, topics, and debugging.
• Since she couldn’t spare time for research and note-taking, therefore there will be situations where she would be clueless and would require external guidance. There is also a chance of decreased interest in subsequent videos because some tough concept was not understood clearly and is being used again and again.
• She’s at a much more confident stage right now and it will be a good time to introduce her to the sprint with a simple task. She wouldn’t be frequently bugging the supervising senior devs for doubts.

Conclusion: Watch and practice cover almost half of the total learning. We really observe the benefits of parallel practice during actual implementation. We are not lost when writing a piece of code from scratch. However, we will slow down at some point as we are missing the complete picture due to lack of research and still have to refer to the tutorial on multiple occasions because it’s not yet committed to memory.

Research (20%)

Let’s say Neha went through the complete 50 hours of tutorial with parallel practice where she followed every step mentioned in that video. She also took her time to research every confusing concept by googling about it and exploring different videos, articles, or other short tutorials. Assuming she spent 4–5 hours more for every hour of tutorial then at this stage she-

• Has a decent understanding of all the topics and would do a remarkable job when presented with any work without much help.
• Not only she’ll excel at her work but can help her peers too. Just because her concepts are crystal clear.
• The only drawback at this stage is that 50 hours of tutorial is too much to digest. Without some long-term retention mechanism, it gets tougher and tougher to remember previous lectures and those research findings.
• Neha will be operating with confidence and it shall be visible in the daily meetings where she would showcase her great work. Not only she would imprint on the project by taking ownership but her freshly earned confidence will be infectious to other team members.

Conclusion: Watch, practice, and research will give us complete control of the topic. We can easily handle the job but the only regret would be not having a quick reference where all those tough concepts and research findings would be documented.

Commit (40%)

Let’s say Neha went through the complete 50 hours of tutorial with parallel practice and research. However, this time she made sure to document any tough concepts, research findings, or any easy to forget items in a handwritten notebook. She is taking her time to index, note, scribble, highlight and mark the topics for future reference. Assuming she spent 6–9 hours more for every hour of tutorial then at this stage she-

• Became the subject matter expert on that topic and will be able to solve difficult problems quickly.
• With this notebook now she can revise the concepts in just seconds even after a year of finishing the tutorial. Notebooks work like indexing in Databases and all the important stuff is maintained separately for quick comprehension.
• Neha will be operating with that strong conviction that only comes from deep understanding. Right now, she is not only capable of doing her job as a beginner but also capable of participating in R&D initiatives with other strong developers. She will be the one picked to guide other members, do ad-hoc work for other teams, and become the top recommendation for leadership roles with the best salary hike. It’s all possible because she has time to spare even after her primary work.

Conclusion: The goal of doing tutorials is not just covering the videos somehow but learning a new skill. Going through the 4 stages of Watch, Practice, Research, and Commit gives us complete confidence in the subject. Making handwritten notes is an ancient art of comprehension & long-term memory retention. It commits the concept to our brain. One catch about writing notes is that we are only able to do it properly when we understand the concept clearly and are able to jot it down in simple words with easy-to-remember references. Beware of mindless copy-pasting in Notebook to fill pages. Notes are the secret recipe to mastering a new skill, they might be time-consuming to do but the results are mind-blowing.

Back to the question

How long should Neha dedicate to completing this 50-hour video tutorial?

If learning a new skill then my rule is 10 times the actual tutorial hours. So in Neha’s case, it would be 500 hours overall which can be spanned across 2 to 4 months.

It’s 10 times because for each hour we have-
1 hr — Watch (10%)
3 hr — Practice (30%)
2 hr — Research (20%)
4 hr — Commit (40%)

NOTE: In the commit stage, it’s not just the writing that takes 4 hours but thorough research and repeated practice to come to a final conclusion.

The 10–30–20–40 rule works very well with programming video tutorials which are not the easiest hence the derived 10 times duration is helpful and an accurate prediction. The stages may overlap, shorten or exceed, for example, some Research might take a few days or more but it'll balance out throughout the session.

Note to Managers / Team Leads / L&D Heads

Give Neha that time and space to be ready!

Sometimes spending 500 hrs of company time may not be justifiable especially when there’s pressure to onboard a new member in the project ASAP but it'll pay back multiple folds when Neha starts operating with that strong conviction and ownership.

If you observe Neha doing the binge-watch without practice then give her 2 weeks and after that share a test project with her. When she struggles then introduce this 10–30–20–40 rule to her to start fresh.

Note to Neha

Please do not binge-watch tutorials! even if you see your seniors binge-watching at 2x speed. Please ignore them! Their fundamentals are strong and they might be looking for something specific or re-watching the tutorial. They may also not show their notebooks for fear of nerd perception or maintaining that cool look. It’s also possible they do not comprehend the 10–30–20–40 rule, in that case, you'll supersede them eventually after completing your 4 stages.

About Me

I have acquired all the money-making technologies knowledge through video tutorials from YouTube, Pluralsight, Pirple, Udemy, etc, and am able to make more money than MAANG jobs. I have around 110 notebooks of 200 pages each of which the top 12 stay with me at all times. As of today, I don’t remember many of the MongoDB concepts because was doing a lot of SQL last year but it'll take me just 10 mins to do 2 weeks' worth of videos just because I have a well-indexed, compressed, handwritten notes.

Once I complete the 4 stages, I don’t fumble around googling stuff on StackOverflow or documentation. I start building things relentlessly, with best practices and trailblazing speed. That quality of work and speed is not possible without the 4 stages which became evident to me when I became cocky and started doing Angular after binge-watch.

I am a full-stack developer by profession and have worked with big enterprise clients as well as small impactful startups. I also provide Full stack training using MERN stack to hundreds of students every week. I did a lot of work on the team-building side from technical interviews to onboarding and mentoring. That’s when I saw the need for the 10–30–20–40 rule.

Ending Notes

Many thanks to Andrea Piacquadio, Caio, Karolina Grabowska, and the great folks at pexels.com for the free stock images.