A Waste of Time?
Posted by Ben Jackson Tue, 13 Dec 2005 23:22:00 GMT
On average, I spend between 1 and 2 hours out of my 8-hour day doing and reading things that are pointedly not what I'm working on at the moment. How can I afford this kind of time when deadlines are looming, the client is screaming over the phone and the neighbors are complaining about that smell emanating from the kitchen? Well, in my opinion, I can't afford not to do this. It's called research, and it's what ensures that I'll be as competitive in three years as I am now.
My surfing generally takes two forms: passive and active research. Passive research is the first thing I do after rolling out of bed and slugging down my coffee; it consists mainly of checking my newsfeeds, mailing lists and any other information sources that I find reliably offering up useful nuggets of wisdom. Yeah, I could do this once a week instead of once or twice a day, but then I've had enough experiences where I read about a new process or tool and started using it to save time THAT SAME DAY that I can justify not waiting on these.
Active research is something I engage in more infrequently, usually once or at most twice a week. This is when I sit down with a task in mind, and decide to learn a new language, or write a few time-saving commands for my favorite text editor, or check out a new management philosophy I read about that week. This is when I get stuff done, in a tangible and goal-oriented way.
I don't attach more importance to one or the other. Passive research is sort of like a big funnel, and is mostly me wading through a bunch of information and filtering out the things that I can either act on immediately (i.e. installing the latest version of Rails) or file away for my next focused research session, so they compliment each other nicely.
