Flood and Shallow? Deep and Breath Studies
I link to have a directions otherwise you might got lost into the middle of the news feed, twitter and flood of infoq, youtube and vimeo videos.
In the past i got my left reading a lot but most of not that interesting or useful to me, luckily today we have better tools like twitter and prismatic but we still have to deal with the overload and flood.
Sounds like i`m saying you need have a big data stack for you to figure out what todo but is not. So for me starts with the passion, so whats are your fields of interest or what are the things you want get better, i try to not focus in so many things at the same time but 4 areas most of time.
If your fields of interest have link - thats great because make it all connected and easier to get more with less, if they dont have connection still could be useful in sense of creativity. How to organize the studies around areas or subjects of matters?
Deep Dimension
Pick something and go deeper into it, so today deep means a lot, means more than 1 book, means more than 1 project. This is good because if you keep focusing on it you will become an expert. But today we need be way more than experts we need know about other things this things can make us better experts or even make us pivot to the more accurate expert field.
Breath Dimension
This is another study mention for me. Its different from the previsions one, this could be just a little bit of your time in few days, this is what someone could call useless culture but i consider thins into ares that are close to your subjects of interest. So this could be just 1 video on infoq or a simple project to code something just to have a taste.
Combination is a must
I like to combine this 2 models, and do both at the same time. This could be unreasonable for lots of people. Today Management wisdom says you should not make some better on what is worst - instead you should get a strong point and make it better. So i try todo a little bit of each one. So you might have a mix of Breath and Deeps with thinks you have interest and/or things you know you need get better like attitudes or other capabilities / skills.
As a coach i encourage people to have multiple sources of studies - i dont think people can have just one king of interest or study are - for IT is pretty complicated now a days :-), If you work into a project you will need learn things, if you work with other people you will need to learn new attitudes, if you into a company will need to learn new skills, not to mention the market / industry will demand off new skills time to time. So you cant just do one thing, having this to clean dimensions and clearly spend different times and for each one but doing both at the same time was very useful for me.
Boring - So what?
It`s easy to get boring doing this. For sure will have more fun stuff if you just drop your agenda and go read or do anything randomly as you see into your feed stream. That`s why there is this *Breath* model here, so you can inject some random things into the middle of your deep efforts.
Sometimes some books or videos are pretty boring. But i learned lots of amazing things from boring stuff - its hard but often it can pay off even you dont get 100% back if you get 1% is worth while doing. For me as more as you know - more and more things you get boring - so how much boring is real? I dont know sometimes could be your egos - so keep it down is a good idea. :-)
Cheers,
