Career
In this section, John helps the reader decide what they want to get out of their career and provides insights on how to achieve those goals. He refers to us as the blacksmiths of old setting up shop and honing our skills in a city. Some of the chapters were a little more difficult, albeit amusing, to discuss with my co-workers. Especially in the chapters dedicated to quitting your job, freelancing, and consulting.First, John has the reader come up with a niche market that their skillset could be applied to. He starts out by having the reader come up with their skillset and the niche market interested in that skillset. This task was a little difficult to go over with my co-workers as we are already apart of a niche market. Then he has the reader come up with big goals that can be broken down into more manageable and obtainable goals. I was especially in need of the reminder to come back and measure the progress made towards these goals.
Other chapters cover people skills, being a professional, and climbing the corporate ladder. My team appreciated and discussed these chapters at pretty good length as that is something we currently struggle with and are working to improve upon. In these, John recommends keeping a daily log of activities, and measuring productivity. My team has agreed to keep track of our daily activities using a tool called Toggl and I also try to plan my day more effectively using Trello. One of the most difficult chapters, and also one of my favorite, was the chapter about being a professional. I would like to consider myself a professional at all times, but there is always room to improve and grow - and I will admit some of my habits are not the best or most effective use of my time. I have also begun working on avoiding all arguments. I agree that most of them are more work than they are worth and usually very little or no good comes of them.
There are even chapters on how to quit your job, how to get started freelancing, how to create an initial product, and other topics related to these. I personally was looking forward to the freelancing chapter. I would be lying if I said I had not considered dabbling with on the side but was always to afraid of the unknowns and the lack of definitive information on it. The chapter covers some aspects of finding clients, goes over some of the benefits and downfalls, and touches briefly on the costs and rate that you should expect. But my biggest concern in this area has always been taxes and creating a business entity, and while I understand John isn't a financial adviser (and actually recommends speaking to one several times throughout the book) even a cursory glimpse on what to expect and how to handle these areas would have gone a long way to improving this chapter for me.
To tie this section all together, John included some chapters on how to improve your resume, how to improve your chances through the interview process, and to keep an open mind when it comes to other technology. I especially took to heart the last one - to keep an open mind. I have been known to be an avid Mac hater, and while I do have my reasons - for the most part - I think I should get past that instead of maintaining a blind hatred for their PC products. It's something I will have to work on. The chapter on improving the chances of an interview and a job opportunity were insightful. While these two chapters were helpful, I found the chapter on improving your resume to be lackluster since he tells you to hire someone else to create it for you. For some people this may be useful advice, but I don't think it merits a full chapter.
Marketing Yourself
One of my favorite sections, this kicked off the renewed vigor of keeping my blog up to date. I have known that branding is important, but perhaps not given it enough of a priority in my endeavors. These chapters also preach bringing values to others which is something I can get behind. I would say some of my most productive days/years were the ones where I was dedicated to learning and teaching, and since starting frequently updating have found again that is is something I particularly enjoy. To market myself I have even started using hashtags, which I promised myself I would never use - but am moving past as I should which was mentioned in the last section. Other than blog posts, John recommends speaking, presenting, training, writing books/articles/magazines, and generally just putting yourself out there. Which is easier than it sounds on paper, but is a skillset that can be learned and improved upon. As long as you are not afraid to be wrong and possibly look like an idiot, which is how he wraps this section up.Learning
Another chapter I was interested in reading. Half of the section is dedicated to his 10-step learning process, which is not a bad process. It basically comes down to diving in, then learning to fill in gaps, then teaching. There are some precursor steps to figure out what you should be focusing on learning and to narrow down the field of vision, at least to start. This theory matches the better of my own learning successes. The rest of the section covers finding a mentor, degrees, and finding/identifying the gaps in your knowledge. The latter of this matching with the email I received stating "of course Soft Skills doesn't cover everything, I want you to be motivated to fill in the gaps". But at the same time one could argue that his book should be used to fill in the gaps with this logic.. Just saying. I still enjoyed the section, and would recommend reading it.Productivity
Probably the chapter I need the most, and need to put in the most work to put into practice. I have ADD, which makes focusing and remembering what task I was currently working on a difficult task in and of itself. I have lists of things to do that I keep to remind me what my focus is. I tend to update them daily - which is tedious and can be time consuming, plus I never complete everything on my list which can be rather disappointing. For this reason, I like John's suggestion to do quarterly, monthly, weekly, AND THEN daily planning. The problem then becomes managing these lists, which he also has a suggestion (based on a technique I believe) where you have a list of items for a day and at the end of the day you draw a line. This becomes your backlog of items to take priority tomorrow. Anything else gets added below the line. This may not be conducive to tasks that have shifting priorities, but the concept should still be the same. I'm also giving Trello a try since it has a similar thought process but allows me to divide them up differently. John uses Trello as well, but has card collections for each day of the week, which I never thought of trying. He can then move them amongst the days of the week.Another suggestion, and one that I've heard of before but never tried is the Pomodoro Technique, which I will have to try using the online tomato timer. This breaks up your day into half-hour segments, which for each half-hour is divided up into 25 minutes of work and 5 minutes of rest. This can be altered - which is something I'd probably do as 25 minutes seems too short of a time-span to achieve any real results. The important part is that you are giving your mind those breaks in between. Using this technique, John has a quota of Pomodoros he must complete in a given day/week time-frame. This kind of goes hand and hand with Agile time of breaking things into nothing bigger than 4 hour tasks. This helps keep you accountable as well.
John also covers why multi-tasking is bad, and how to get past burnout, and getting rid of distractions. I can not multi-task to save my life so I can get behind this 100% - but maybe that is also because my attention diverts so quickly. I think everyone experiences burnout at some time, and John's solution is simple. Keep going until it passes. He thinks it is just a phase that is part of the project process. So I will have to try it out to see if my projects get to completion when it hits. Lastly, John covers getting rid of TV, and other distractions, developing a routine and good habits, and really just taking action instead of being passive. I know I personally turn into a zombie in front of TV; and so have tried to limit the amount of exposure I have of it. I agree with his prognosis that unless you are watching something like the discover channel - you are wasting brain cycles. The entire point of television is to market to you to get you to buy things, and we buy into it! But hard work is difficult for us to start. We are by nature lazy; we come up with tools to simplify our lives and make it easier.
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