How should a smart beginner study to rapidly improve given limited time to play?
I am like 2 months into learning some of the basics. I don't plan to spend more than about 10 hours a week on this hobby between play and study. I wouldn't say I have any real background in games, no chess experiences as a kid etc, but I have a degree in math and am reasonably good at picking up new skillsets.
My goal here is basically to get to a point where I could go to any 1/2 or 1/3 game (either in a home game or a casino) and feel pretty confident that I can beat it. I will likely not ever play enough to confidently say I can actually beat it, but reading this subreddit I am getting the impression that you can know if you are playing correctly even without statistically significant results. I am giving myself 1 year to accomplish this.
Wondering what folks who made the leap from total fish to reasonable low stakes players would recommend to make this happen as fast as possible. So far I'm playing 10NL on a few sites; I'm about breakeven on maybe 10,000 hands or so, which I gather is meaningless but I am tracking this in a spreadsheet closely. And I'm spending about half my play/study time taking Jonathan Little's courses on pokercoaching.com. This is fine for learning by osmosis, but I've BSed my way through enough college courses to know that blindly watching lectures isn't how you actually learn. I've never had an interest in any kind of gambling in my life, so I'm actually playing to try to teach myself to be more comfortable with risk and ambiguity.
What would people recommend? I'm maybe an unusual case here in that so far I actually prefer studying the game to playing it lol (I can already see a leak developing around risk appetite here that I'm attempting to plug), so very willing to put in the work even without getting to have that much "fun" in the meantime.
Any recommendations for the right way to study given these constraints and goals? The thing that I find difficult is that its hard to take any specific lesson I learn in one of these courses and put it into immediate practice, because it just might not arise often enough for me to get the reps in. But these drill sites and solver stuff seems like a stupid use of a beginner's time as well given how far from GTO my opponents at these stakes will play.
And damn this shits such a cool and nuanced game, I get the hype guys.