I think I just formalized why I like reading.

A six month project expects approximately

6 months * 4 weeks / month * 40 hours / week = 960 hours.

If you read material pertaining to your project that takes five hours at the beginning of your project, you only need to save 12.5 minutes per week to justify reading it. That’s maybe two or three google searches for trivial topics or a pretty in-depth search if you’re not sure what you’re looking for. I think that the time invested pays for itself pretty quickly.

But what’s more, you learn solutions that are even better than the ones that you might have come up with otherwise because your learning is condensed and you are seeing best practices and rationale.