How long did it take you to reach certain milestones?

[Zarxrax]

I'm trying to get an idea of roughly how much practice is needed to get good at the rubik's cube, and how much it can vary from person to person.
I'm not interested in figures like weeks or months, because that is meaningless, as it says nothing about how much time you have actually invested. I would like people to try and break their practice down into actual hours.
If you are currently improving at a fairly solid rate, it would also be interesting if you could keep a log of your actual time, and then post back here later, once you've hit another milestone.

I've been cubing for roughly 1.33 years, but I don't spend a whole lot of time on it. I would say on average, I spend about 15 minutes a day cubing (just counting the 3x3x3, not including other puzzles). There have been days where I've spent several hours, and days where I didn't even pick the cube up. But I think it probably averages out to about 15 minutes a day.
So, lets say about 16 months, which is about 485 days. 15 minutes a day works out to a little over 120 hours of cubing. Or I could be a bit conservative and drop the figure down to 100 hours.
With 100 hours of experience under my belt, I'm finally breaking the sub-30 barrier on about half of my averages.
And it probably took me around 30-40 hours of practice to get to sub-60.

So how do you measure up?

 

[koreancuber]

around 60~70 hours to get me sub 23.

 

[oprah62]

30 hours to be sub 30 50hrs to be sub 20

 

[Samania]

around 60~70 hours to get me sub 23.

Thats how long it took for me to get it solved in the first place

It took me around 50 hours to get sub 30.

 

[StachuK1992]

around 60~70 hours to get me sub 23.

Thats how long it took for me to get it solved in the first place

It took me around 50 hours to get sub 30.

contradiction is contradictory

 

[nlCuber22]

100+ hours for low 15.

 

[dillonbladez]

I guess it would be 50-70 hrs. for 25 to sub-30. not sub 20 yet

 

[StachuK1992]

Eww I'm pathetic.
Probably, erm, 700 hours total cubing.
So like 400hrs 3x3 so far, and only ~22. Absolutely pathetic.

 

[FatBoyXPC]

I was cubing for years before I finally did the cube the way I do it now. So if you count my endless hours of keyhole f2l + completely horrid 2+ LOLL / 2-3 LPLL then it'd be easily 200 hours.

However if you count from last August until now, it'd be less than 150 hours of solid practice, not counting when I'm just messing around with it not even trying to solve (such as random scrambling while in a conversation then making sure to solve it before I put it down and go do something).

 

[aronpm]

For about 2 months I was doing an avg100 each day. An average of 100 might take an hour and a half. So that's 60 * 1.5 = 90 hours. There were probably about 30 hours before that, so, I guess about 120 hours.

If I assume an overall average of 30s for all my solves ever, then the number of solves done is something like 120*60*60/30 = 14440 solves. That sounds about right.

 

[koreancuber]

wait... i spend around 30 minutes a day, five days a week for four months. That's around 40 hours. WTF did I calculate up there?

 

[Chapuunka]

I'm very sporadic with my practice, so this is hard. I'm guesstimating ~40-50 hours to get 20-23 averages. Maybe not even that much. I spent almost 6 months on beginners method just solving for fun, not even speedsolving (I think I even got down to 45 sec). Only sometime early this year did I even start Fridich.

 

[AvidCuber]

I started speedcubing seriously in January (well that's when I found out about different methods and stuff, I could do beginner's method at about 2:00 probably), and I actually started learning stuff in March-ish (that's when I joined this forum), back then I only cubed for about 30 minutes per day perhaps, and starting in May I started to get really attached and did maybe an hour a day (not necessarily all at once). So let's see, for 2 months (March/April) I did 30 mins/day (approx.), which is ~3 hours, in one month and 9 days is about 40 hours, so I've been speedcubing for 43 hours, give or take (lol that sounds very short).

So if we take a look at how I've progressed since March, I looked at some of my Sunday Contest averages. At the beginning of March, I was over a minute (so not able to do the Sunday Contest), but then in the last week or so of March, I was at around 45-50 seconds. By the end of April, I was around 37-43 seconds, and in the middle of May I was at around 35-37 seconds. Now, I'm getting usually averages of 12 between 28-33 (I know, inconsistent).

I'm pretty happy with my progress.

 

[Anthony]

Honestly, this is pretty useless. Most of us have been cubing so long that there's absolutely no way you can come up with a good estimate. Whatever number you come up with is really just a guess (unless you're eccentric and literally abide by a cubing schedule).

 

[Erdos]

I'd like to know how long people have been cubing and how long it took them to get to a certain milestone, not necessarily for any research to "determine" something, but simply because of mild interest. It'd be interesting to see how long people spent on their cube trying to reach specific times such as sub 1 min, sub 45s, sub 30s, sub 20s, etc. I'm sure most people would remember these times anyway.

For example, if you got to a 45s average to sub 30s average in only a couple days (let's say 3), we can only assume that you really wanted to get faster and therefore spent a large majority of hours cubing within that time period.

This would probably be contrary to the purpose of this topic though. I don't think you could come up with any significant conclusion regardless, but okay.

 

[TeddyKGB]

Honestly, this is pretty useless. Most of us have been cubing so long that there's absolutely no way you can come up with a good estimate. Whatever number you come up with is really just a guess (unless you're eccentric and literally abide by a cubing schedule).

This ^, With my 5+ years of cubing I've got no clue how many hours I spent cubing, plus for the first 4-4 1/2 years I wasn't really trying to get any better I spent probably 3-4 year hovering around a 50-55s Avg. so none of that was really time spent getting better, just time spent mindlessly cubing.

 

[Zarxrax]

Honestly, this is pretty useless. Most of us have been cubing so long that there's absolutely no way you can come up with a good estimate. Whatever number you come up with is really just a guess (unless you're eccentric and literally abide by a cubing schedule).

Of course we can't get accurate times from most people, but we can get some fairly reasonable estimates. Most peoples answers so far have been reasonably close to one another, and then there are some standouts that might seem exceptionally good or exceptionally slow.
I think its these outliers that are the interesting cases. Why did someone improve at a very quick rate? Why did someone improve very slowly? These are important questions that we may be able to learn from.

 

[Anthony]

I think its these outliers that are the interesting cases. Why did someone improve at a very quick rate? Why did someone improve very slowly? These are important questions that we may be able to learn from.

Okay, let's use you as an example.

There have been days where I've spent several hours, and days where I didn't even pick the cube up. But I think it probably averages out to about 15 minutes a day.

^ See? That's a total guess. Those "outliers" may indeed have improved at an unusual rate, or their given rate of improvement is just unusually off.
Like I said, this is just a guessing game, to a certain extent.

 

[Ryanrex116]

Over 2.5 years, I think the average amount of time per day I solve is around 70 minutes (it fluctuates a lot). I think I spend about 40 of those minutes on 3x3. Probably most of that is scrambling, inspection, taking breathers, drinking water, etc. That leaves 15 minutes, maybe.

~900 days*15 minutes= 13,500 minutes= 225 hours of pure solving.

I am sub-20, but that is pretty much all I can say right now. Some days I am at 19, some days I am at 17. Just as a note, most of the time is due to my choice to be color neutral from the start, and to not turn very slowly. But hey, I still got to sub-20, and I like that I had to work hard for it. I don't care that most people get to sub-20 more quickly than I.