The afternoon spent learning one small technique can improve projects you have not imagined yet.

Skills do not stay in the box you learned them in. An afternoon spent understanding how to sharpen properly, or how one function works, quietly raises the floor under everything you make afterward. The return is invisible at the time, which is why these afternoons are the first thing that gets cancelled when the week is busy.

Pick one small technique that keeps coming up and give it a single afternoon, without a project attached. Learn it properly rather than well enough. You will not be able to point to what it saved you, and that is exactly the shape this kind of progress takes.