Sharpening the Saw

Posted by Rich Crowley in books, Change, Personal Improvement, thinking

One of the benefits of being a free agent / contractor is that between contracts, you get to wipe the slate clean and start over.  Downtime between gigs provides the opportunity to evaluate what worked and what didn’t in your last engagement and in general, assess and document what you learned.

It also affords you the opportunity to overlay your last engagement with all your prior experiences.  It’s quite interesting to see what similarities you find (in people, company cultures, approaches, etc.) as well as where some aspect of the last engagement may have been an outlier.

Of course, another benefit of downtime is that it allows you to “sharpen the saw” (the 7th habit in Covey’s 7 Habits book).  Over the last several weeks of 2015, I was able to take such a break.  It was wonderful and allowed me to delve into a nice mix of things I had on the list but hadn’t seemed to get to over the last little while.  In no particular order, here’s some of these things:

• a mobile upgrade:  with some regret, I said goodbye to my Blackberry and went back to an iPhone.  I have had great success with my berries but since I have made a significant investment of my time in the iOS development ecosystem over the past couple of years, it was time to make the leap for good.  Along with this upgrade, I was able to take full advantage of several apps that may have worked on my berry but which work with elegance and simplicity on iOS.  I’m now using audiobooks during time in the car, Feedly for my favourite blogs, getAbstract for book summaries, Paper for free form content creation on my iPad and I now have ample room for my music library (for some reason, streaming music hasn’t grabbed me yet but may well shortly).  And of course, being a multi-device person, I’ve been able to get my world all set up so that my various services work, and my content is synched, across my different devices.
• online training via Lynda.com (now owned by linkedin):  In the past, I’ve been primarily a book guy when I want help in learning a new skill (I made the switch to an e-reader several years ago). During these past few weeks though, I have had great success wandering through a bunch of online videos on this service and highly recommend it
• reading:  I am someone who reads books in sprints.  I can go many months without reading one and then will knock off a few over a relatively short period of time.  I recently read The Power of Habit by Duhigg and loved it.  Really fascinating science behind how our brains work.  (Can’t say I am any better at fighting off the urge for chocolate when I roll into the kitchen but I do understand what’s happening now).  I also re-read Leading Strategic Change by Black and Gregersen (one of my favs on how to go about organizational change) and am almost through The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver as well as Thinking Fast and Slow by Kahneman.   I’m also currently reading Leading Digital by Bonnet and Westerman.   Good read so far, with some really cool insights about what makes a company a leader in digital, but also a bit windy for my liking.
• exploring all things digital:  I’ve been trying to get a better grip on why all the current buzz around digital transformation.   I’m not a skeptic but believe we have been living in an age of digital transformation for several decades now so why all the emphasis on the word “digital” recently?   In my journey to understand this, I’ve tried to read as much as I can about this from thoughtful sources, by just being curious and by keeping my eyes open for things that appear to me to be true digital innovations.   I have tried to really understand how such things as streaming audio and video, cloud-based Web Services, big data, the internet of things, digital money, privacy technologies and cyber war capabilities are really changing our lives and what this means from a business and society perspective.  I’ve watched, and talked to, my kids about how they live in the digital world, how digital is embedded in their education and social lives, how they consume content that I used to just call TV.   I have no verdict or even summary thoughts on this yet but will try to arrive at something concrete in a future post.

It was a wonderful way to end 2015.  Alas, 2016 is here and I’m excited about what it will bring.