What’s contributing to the gap?

The gap exists for only 2 reasons:

You can’t find the time.
You found the time, but something else is standing in your way of learning something new.

We’ll cover #1 in this article and address #2 in a later article.

So you can’t find the time.

Maybe you have you have other things filling your day. What are those things? Can you list them?

Before diving deep into finding time, convince yourself of the 3 basic truths when you don’t have enough time:

I don’t have enough time to learn everything I want. What should I do? - Hacker Bits

Hopefully, you’re now convinced that you have a choice, you have the time and that you must choose (otherwise someone else chooses for you).

Regarding that list of things that fill your day…

There’s only 2 ways to deal with them:

Don’t do them.
Do them.

Omit it.

Deciding to not do something is the most straight-forward way of freeing up time.

If you decide to omit a to-do, make sure you can live with the consequences and that it won’t take up more of your time to clean up later.

If you decide that something does need to be done, there’s only 2 ways to handle this:

Someone else does it.
You do it.

Outsource it.

If someone else does it, keep in mind there’s always overhead when you outsource something that you did to someone else.

In other words, despite someone else doing it, you’ll need to invest time so they know what to do, help them when they encounter issues, review their work, etc.

Despite this overhead, outsourcing a to-do can potentially save you lots of time.

If you’ve decided that you must do it yourself, there’s only 3 ways to handle to-dos:

Do it now.
Do it later.
Orchestrate it.

Doing the to-do now doesn’t save you any time.

Interestingly, doing it later also doesn’t save you any time. While you have some more time now, you’ll eventually need to take care of the to-do in the future.

Orchestrate it.

The only remaining option is to orchestrate the to-do. Orchestrating a to-do means automating and sequencing it.

Some to-dos cannot be automated (e.g. one-off tasks), but many more can be automated than you think.

Automating a to-do means clearly defining the steps for doing the to-do, so that you’ll save some time the next time you do it.

Make it easier to do this next time. Find the best steps and write them down. If it’s something you can get a computer to do, why not write a small script to completely automate it?

Then sequence it in your day so that it gets done.

In summary…

In order to get to a place where you have time to learn, you must:

Convince yourself of the 3 basic truths.
Find time by omitting the to-do (not gonna do it!).
Find time by outsourcing the to-do (someone else is gonna do it).
Find time by orchestrating the to-do (automate and sequence it).