Five ways to prioritise professional learning and CPD
Discover practical productivity strategies to make learning and CPD a regular habit, even when your schedule is already full.
In brief
- Regular, short CPD sessions are more effective than leaving all your learning until the deadline.
- Schedule learning time into your weekly calendar just as you would a client meeting.
- Make yearly, quarterly and weekly learning planning a habit.
When every day feels full, professional learning including CPD can easily slip down the priority list. Yet there are many ways to reclaim your schedule and efficiently achieve your learning goals and CPD requirements, says productivity expert and author Donna McGeorge.
From mindset shifts to smarter habits, discover her tips for making learning a consistent, non-negotiable part of your career growth.
Why do busy professionals often struggle to prioritise professional learning?
Learning doesn't bite back straight away. Miss a client deadline and the phone rings within the hour. Skip your CPD for six months and nothing immediately happens. That silence is the trap because it tells your brain the task was never urgent in the first place.
What mindset shifts are needed to move CPD from an ‘extra’ to a non-negotiable?
The first shift is realising CPD was never optional, you just priced it that way in your own head. Nobody calls payroll or client delivery an ‘extra’. The label you’ve attached to your own development is doing more damage than the lack of time ever did.
What are the most effective ways to carve out time for learning in a packed schedule?
Stop hunting for spare time because spare time is a myth. You take it from somewhere with intent.
Most people are sharpest in the first couple of hours of the day, before the inbox and the meetings have had a chance to drag their attention sideways. That precious window usually gets handed over to email and small admin jobs that could easily wait until 3pm.
Schedule 20–30 minutes in your diary as an appointment, the same way you would a client meeting. An unscheduled intention is a wish, whereas a scheduled block is a commitment and your brain treats the two completely differently.
Stop treating CPD as a once-a-year scramble before the deadline; that pattern is exhausting and teaches your brain that development is a chore to be endured, rather than a habit worth developing.
How do you recommend overcoming procrastination, especially for mentally demanding learning tasks?
Most procrastination isn’t laziness, it’s your brain grabbing for something more immediately rewarding instead. Checking email feels like progress because you can watch the inbox empty in real time. A dense technical module offers nothing like that same hit, even though it’s moving your career forward.
Work with the wiring instead of fighting it. Shrink the task until it feels almost insultingly easy. Not ‘complete the module’ but ‘open the module and read one page’. The brain that recoils from an hour of dense content will happily agree to one page and momentum grows from there.
Get the phone out of the room. Even a silent, screen-down phone drags on concentration. You can’t out-discipline a device deliberately engineered to be the most interesting thing in the room.
Work in short, fierce bursts. Twenty concentrated minutes on one task beats 90 minutes of half focus.
What kind of planning can CAs put in place to make professional development habits stick? Should you make plans weekly, quarterly or yearly?
All three, and each one is doing a completely different job.
Yearly is for the big shape of the thing. Look at your CPD hours requirement for the period and your renewal date, then work backwards from there.
Quarterly is for course correction. Are you roughly on pace, ahead or quietly slipping behind? Quarterly is frequent enough to catch drift early but not so frequent that you’re overly fussing with the plan.
Weekly is where the work gets done and this is the level most people skip entirely, which is why their CPD never sticks. A specific, named block in the diary, same day, similar time, most weeks. Vague yearly intentions don’t get you over the line, scheduled Tuesday mornings do.
How can professionals avoid burnout, while adding learning commitments to an already full workload?
Stop planning your week as though you have eight productive hours in every single day because you rarely do. Pretending otherwise is how burnout happens. Create breathing room for the inevitable interruption, the urgent client call, the kid who wakes up sick. Adding CPD on top of an already maxed-out week is borrowing from your own future exhaustion.
Five tips to help you stay consistent with professional learning
- Small, repeated sessions beat big and occasional every time, with no exceptions.
- Stack the habit onto something you already do without thinking, such as straight after the school drop-off. The existing habit drags the new one along behind it like a wagon.
- Make progress visible. Track modules completed, hours logged, chapters finished. Watching your progress is doing real psychological work, not just decoration on a spreadsheet.
- Build in a recovery rule for the days you fall off, because you will fall off, that's just how habits work in real life. The plan that survives is the one that says missing a day means you get straight back on tomorrow. The plan that demands perfection collapses.
- Find another person doing the same CPD requirement and check in with them regularly, even briefly. Accountability doesn’t need to be formal to do its job.
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