“Dear L&D” is a reflective letter-style series where learning leaders address the profession directly, giving voice to the lessons, challenges and opportunities shaping the future of learning and development (L&D).

Dear L&D,

It’s not you — it’s us.

We had a crazy day today. We woke up to an overflowing inbox. We scrambled from meeting to meeting all day, back-to-back. We got an endless series of pings from the group chat and even more from the side chats to the group chat. We batted back messages from our kids’ schools and our parents’ caregivers. We placated our bosses and tried to cheer up our teams.

We love to learn. But we didn’t find time to do it today.

Listen, we know you’ve tried to make it easier for us.  So much of what you put out these days is pretty short, based online and available on demand, and don’t get us wrong, that’s helpful when we’re fighting for time. If we had to get up, walk away from our laptops and go to a classroom every time we wanted to learn something…put it this way, we would not get to engage in many learning opportunities.

But even with content that’s measured in minutes and right at our fingertips, we’re still not getting to it in a timely fashion. And we know you’re confused by this!

You’re asking yourselves: “They can’t just spend 30 minutes on this training? Or even five minutes just getting started on it? Can’t they just block off a few minutes and get it done?”

We’ve tried that. We have terrific intentions! At baseline, we want to be compliant with our organization’s policies and not get in trouble for not taking required trainings or getting enough training hours done. At best, we’re genuinely intrigued by the content you’re offering — be it insight into how to be a better manager or the latest artificial intelligence (AI) updates.

But here’s what happens. We put that tiny little 30-minute block on our calendars. And then life happens. Another urgent initiative gets added. The numbers start looking bad and the big boss wants to meet with everyone ASAP. A team member is in crisis, and we have to find a minute to speak to them.

That 30-minute calendar block is always the first thing to go.

Why? Let’s go back to that word “urgent.” Think of the famous Eisenhower matrix: urgent versus important. Learning is often important, but it’s almost never urgent. Everything else feels urgent. And there’s way too much of everything else.

We don’t want you to think it’s hopeless, though. We do have a few ways that learning could fit better into our days, as crazy as those days are.

Make Learning Urgent

Learning could lean into the whole “urgent versus important” idea and behave more like a “very important” thing. We could complete fewer chunks of learning with more emphasis placed on them if you have mechanisms that space them out throughout the year to avoid a year-end “let’s just get through all of this” rush. When things are important, we don’t want to rush through them.

This approach means paying more attention to curation. Organizations often add more and more in response to legitimate business imperatives (everything from AI progress to a need for more empathic leaders), and they don’t take anything out of the rotation. Culling down the array of what’s required creates space for what’s truly impactful. It’s hard to feel that a dozen or more pieces of learning are truly important; it’s easier to believe that five are.

Make Learning Easier

Learning could also better mimic the ways we find time in our outrageous calendars to still learn on our own. For example, when some of us want to learn about something, we listen to podcasts at the gym. Give us a podcast and a quiz later, if need be! When we’re away from our laptops, you’re not fighting a million notifications to get noticed.

If you have to come through the laptop channel, why not mimic the newsletters we often happily subscribe to? Send a fascinating article (not seventeen fascinating articles) right to our emails ­— we can read it as we finish our coffee or in a few minutes cadged out between meetings.

Make Learning Worth It

And finally, use fewer sticks like threatening to lower performance scores or even cut compensation — which just layer stress on top of our existing stress and send us deeper into fight-flight-freeze. Add more carrots. Create incentives for learning, and we might get more creative about making it a priority. Take it off the packed to-do list and put it on the much shorter, more motivating “want-to-do” list.

Gamification is helpful for some audiences, particularly younger generations who’ve grown up with this approach; for others, having managers consistently verbally acknowledge their learning efforts — and utilize that data in performance reviews — is more than enough. In both scenarios, positivity serves as the keystone of the approach. Don’t make learning another millstone around our necks.

Because we do want to learn. We want that very much. Help us do that in a world where everything gets in the way.