I used to think that advancing in USACO was impossible with my jam-packed schedule. However, I didn’t give up and kept trying different ways to make the best use of my time. Eventually, I came across several techniques that propelled me all the way to USACO camp, and today I want to share one of those techniques.
The first thing I did was I analyzed where all my time was going, and I found 3 areas that I was spending time on that weren't pushing me to my goals.
The first area was coding adjacent activities. Whenever I would go to Codeforces, I would instantly go down to the blog section and start reading the articles that show up there. While this was fun, reading blogs, even blogs related to coding, wasn’t what I needed to get to the next level. I needed to spend my time focusing on hard problems. Cutting out reading these blogs, browsing Quora, and checking discord gave me lots of time back.
The second area I saved time from was cutting out problems that are too easy. While it's important to start with problems that match your skill level, spending too much time on easy problems can eat into the time you could be using to work on more challenging ones. What I realized was that any problem I could solve easily by myself I would be able to solve in contest, so practicing on those problems is a waste of time. By focusing your efforts on problems that are just beyond your current level of expertise, you can learn new concepts and techniques while also building your problem-solving skills. This way, you can make the most of your study time and develop a more efficient approach to problem-solving, ultimately giving you an edge in the next USACO competition. So, challenge yourself and take on problems that stretch your abilities!
Now, be careful when avoiding problems that are too easy, because spending lots of time on problems that are too hard is also not the best use of time. In fact, the third area I saved time from was avoiding spending too much time on problems that are too difficult for me. While it's important to challenge yourself with tough problems, spending too much time on problems that are beyond your current level of expertise can be counterproductive. I was spending hours and hours on a problem and I was still stuck. Not only is this discouraging, I also didn’t learn as much from all that time as I could have learned.
By cutting out time from these 3 areas, I got so much time back that I didn’t stress about not having enough time ever again, even with a crazy high school schedule. You might be wondering that I’m saying don’t work on too easy problems or too hard problems, what did I end up doing?
I focused on problems that were just beyond my comfort zone - ones that you can solve with getting a few hints from the solution, and that allow you to learn new concepts and techniques. By using your time more effectively, you can make steady progress and build your problem-solving skills, all while avoiding the frustration and wasted time that comes with being stuck on a problem that is too hard for you, and avoiding the wasted time that comes with problems that are trivial for you. Be strategic in your problem selection and focus on the problems that will help you grow and develop as a USACO competitor and you might be surprised at what you can accomplish.