Learning When the World Won't Cooperate
2020 was not, by any measure, a good year for learning. For nearly a decade I taught design, and I know firsthand that curiosity needs certain conditions to flourish. Those conditions were simply absent this year for most people, myself included. Locked down in New York City with a toddler, two cats, and a husband, I spent months battling exhaustion and brain fog instead of pursuing the ambitious study plan I'd charted for myself. That plan, like so much else, went in the trash.
The challenge was not a lack of desire to learn—it was a lack of capacity. After sleepless nights and full days of Zoom meetings while wrangling a child, disciplined, goal-oriented study was out of the question. But I had spent years teaching others how to grow their creativity, and this year I had to apply those lessons to myself. What follows are the strategies that actually helped me keep learning alive in less-than-ideal circumstances.
Give Yourself Permission to Waste Time
My natural instinct was to push harder, to be more efficient, to make up for lost time. That was wrong. When you're low on motivation or approaching burnout, the opposite approach works better: create space to play. Follow what genuinely interests you rather than what you think you should be studying. Let your mind wander. Widen the scope of topics you engage with, even if—especially if—they have nothing to do with building websites.
Leave productivity out of the equation entirely. A life of learning is more complex than a velocity metric. If you're skeptical, look up inquiry-based or constructivist learning theories. They explain why unstructured exploration matters so much. And as a practical bonus, letting my curiosity run free in the evenings often kept me from falling into the Netflix hole or doom-scrolling until midnight.
Revisit Your Own Foundations
When the world is on fire, there is no one weird trick for unblocking productivity. But if building websites still brings you joy or income, and you want advice from someone trained in jump-starting learning, here it is: revisit your foundations. Not the foundations—your foundations.
Psychologists have noted that conjuring nostalgia during stressful times is a healthy coping mechanism. So why not use it to unblock learning? I dove back into what originally brought me to tech: design, CSS, color functions, typography, design patterns. I played in Illustrator, dusted off old repos, looked at happy projects, and remembered old trends. I deliberately avoided burning energy on the hot new thing. Instead, I revisited my foundational understanding through the lens of experience.
This isn't a recommendation to stay in your comfort zone indefinitely. It's a recommendation to start there, because starting is the hard part.
Build Routines Around Your Needs
Disruption hit on every level this year—global, national, and personal. When basic needs like health and psychological safety are threatened, learning suffers. One of the most effective things a teacher can do in a classroom is make sure students have eaten breakfast. The adult equivalent is just as important: prioritize sleep, mental health, and basic care. Punishing yourself for struggling doesn't help anyone learn.
As my support structures disappeared, I had to accept that I couldn't do everything or be everywhere for everyone. That acceptance was difficult. I spent enormous energy shifting my focus from the year I'd wished for to the year I was actually experiencing. Setting up new routines and structures is itself work—significant work—and it should be factored into any honest assessment of your progress. Everything took more energy this year because it did.
Teachers and caregivers have always done difficult, essential work. Anyone who spent this year homeschooling or caring for someone already knows that firsthand. Give yourself credit if you've been taking that on. Showing up, making it through each day, making any progress at all—that counts as success.
The Lesson for the Industry
You might expect me to close with a list of cool design and tech things I learned this year. I won't. What I learned as an individual in 2020 matters less than what I hope we learned as an industry.
The most important thing about building websites is that real people are building them—and those people need to be able to thrive.
Lunch perks and conference swag were never substitutes for childcare, accessibility, and real support structures. Flexible hours and remote-first practices aren't pandemic-era accommodations; they're long-overdue changes. Look at which companies weathered 2020 well and which scrambled to adapt—the ones that supported people before the crisis hit are pulling ahead. It shouldn't have taken a global pandemic to prove this, but here we are.
We need to use what we learned to build a society with stronger principles and more thoughtful structures—not just better websites.
