Are you doing the "Get the book. Read the book. Do the exercises." method? If you are, what's your experience?

I have had some books stored up since forever, and graycat's post did motivate me to finally get around to reading them, but I find it hard to integrate into my daily routine. His 24h challenge killed my productivity for a day, and I can't really afford to get distracted by some tricky proof when I'm supposed to do something else.

Yes, I'm working through a few books that way. I didn't see his 24h challenge so I'm not sure what it is, but what has been effective for me is blocking off a few hours every day to work on this stuff. I haven't gotten to the really difficult material he's talking about yet, but I'm looking forward to seeing how this goes. Good luck to both of us!

The exercises are here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15022458 (that post was downvoted & flagged to death, so you might have to turn on showdead in your profile to see it)

In a different comment chain on the same submission (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15024640), he challenged the commenters disagreeing with him to do these exercises in 24 hours. The tone was pretty abrasive, TBH, but I found the questions interesting enough that I tackled them in earnest.

I posted my solution attempts, so don't scroll down too far if you want to try them on your own ;)