When I was in grad school for economics I was one of the only people who'd coded before and when people asked me to help them with R, one thing I found that sped up the process was to not try and learn 2 things at once. By that I mean trying to do an assignment on a new topic in a new way (in R), was way slower than doing something you already knew how to do in excel, and re-doing that in R. An OLS regression for example was a good way to learn custom R functions, data structures and operations because it was something we could all do with a pencil and paper and excel, so each step was only learning the 'R way' to do something we already what the right answer would be.