Dylan Salisbury’s weblog

I was thinking about Seth Godin’s post today about some essential knowledge worker tasks. Obviously he has been running into some people who have not been able to keep up with modern standards of information worker productivity.

For me, someone more deeply involved in information tools, I have a problem of needing to get better at the right tools and keep current on what’s available, without wasting too much time learning about the new stuff.

Know the tools or own them?

Seth asks if you can imagine a metal worker not knowing how to use a blowtorch. But master craftsman go further and own their own tools (see Professor Terri Griffith’s post about this)… If you’re in this camp, you’ve figured out how to tweak your editor and be very productive with it, but then you will naturally be more reluctant to invest in a new way of doing things.

I heard a story lately about somebody who had worked their way up through a large engineering organization with an old-school Unix background. After 10+ years she was a vi master, but had never even heard of emacs. An extreme example which leads me to…

The challenge of staying current.

A big part seems to be to find a sweet spot of competence with tools that work for me and those I collaborate with, and still stay current on new developments.

For me, the RSS reader is a big part of keeping current. Another part is to have a few friends who are crazy about this stuff.

No — Let me back up — an important competency is to take in a bunch of new information and filter it effeciently. I’m gained some skills in managing my inbox and RSS reader, and now those seem very important to me.

For my own personal version of the Emacs-VI example, after reading Seth’s post I added something to my task list… “Learn how to publish a simple Google Spreadsheet”. Although I’ve been building competence in Excel to support my career at Microsoft and my journey as an MBA student, his post was an eye-opener to me that I’ve got to open my eyes to Google Docs too.