Learn to Carve

It’s Saturday at 2 pm and I’m still in my bathrobe. I’m working on my blog on the weekend. Surely there is nothing you can learn from me.

Are you still here? Well, all right. Here goes. Gartner says that in the next ten years constant upskilling will replace experience in importance in the workplace. CompTIA says that the ability of IT professionals to understand both technology and business is rising in the list of skill gaps that technology professionals need to be closing.

Beyond all that, workload and technical skill gap issues are still smokin’ hot for IT just as they have been for several years now. Oh, and by the way, your company still wants you to innovate, which means, you’re going to need some downtime for your brain so you can come up with new ideas that are all your own.

What does that mean? You better figure out how to do what you need to do, when you need to do it.

You better learn to carve – carve out personal time, carve in technical training and business training.

Did you just scream? You know I’m still in my bathrobe right?

Fortunately, I’ve been reading Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport and marveling over the ways in which addiction can help with scheduling. Stop snickering. An all-nighter does have a way of clearing your calendar, but that’s not what I’m talking about.

Among other things, he addresses these points: digital media and the attention economy have created a state of distraction which results in both an inability to focus and an activity void when we step away from it. To successfully disengage from that digital experience (think social media, surfing, news, and streaming) we have to plan what we are going to do instead. Quitting cold turkey on any behavior leaves us staring into an uncomfortable void and vulnerable to relapse. I’ve hammered on this before – you need to have something great to do in your time off, in order to let go of the emails, all the important work that never ends, and the distractions that chip away at our lives.

Cal Newport then delves into how to reclaim your leisure time. None of this is new info to people who follow this blog but what he does propose is a reverse calendar – plot carefully the time you allow for non-constructive leisure and thereby force yourself to fill the rest of your time with something better. In a word, carve out the best leisure you can. Leisure that gives you time to ponder and create just feels like you have more life in your life.

So let’s bring all that back to the office. You know you have to set aside specific chunks of the day to do focus work that makes a difference. Time for the type of serious training and continuing education professionals need is often something we try to squeeze in on the side. Kinda like your exercise and maybe dinner.

What’s the answer?

Pretty much I’m proposing that we treat training the way we treat a vacation. Those of us who’ve figured out how to actually get our time off, know we need to have it on the calendar early – before the emergency project comes up. That’s so our managers can plan around it, which they can do… if it’s on the calendar.

So your professional training needs to go on the calendar. Your boss needs the details so she can plan around it. Just like a serious vacation, you need to know what you’re going to do and how much it will cost.

Also, you need to understand what you need to learn.

Because technology as a supporting role for business is simply table stakes now, interdisciplinary training along with technical training is going to be the new normal. You can’t come up with cool ways to add value to your business if you don’t know what your business partners are doing. You also can’t offer technical solutions that you don’t know how to build. Looks like us nerds are going to have to start planning in both business learning as well as technical skill development.

Once you know what you need to learn, and you’ve found a good way to learn it, either through a real-life project and online learning, or formal training, you’ll need to budget the time and the money. Just like a vacation. What? This doesn’t sound like fun?

Here’s the other thing. You should leave town – just like when you go on vacation. Try to hand over loose ends to a teammate, turn off your cell phone and put your out of office message on. You don’t have to literally leave town but if you can get your manager and team to treat you like you have – well, then, who wouldn’t want to take on training?

Sound good? Here’s how to make it real.

1. Get your manager’s buy-in.
2. Schedule your learning days, plan and fund your training.
3. Don’t forget to include the certification test. Do the whole thing.
4. Be a team player – offer to support your buddy’s training vacation too.
5. Use the practice of learning days to create cross-training. It’s so much better to get called back for a production issue from your class than from your first post-pandemic trip. So get the team to try like crazy to solve issues without you… just like you’re on vacation. Then, if there’s something they need to brush up on, it’ll be clear and you won’t have to call in from the beach.

Once you’ve carved out time for learning, quality downtime so you can have free-thinking for innovation, time for vacation, and time to do focused work each day, you’re well on the way to be being a master carver, 2021 style.

And that? Is just what we trained for.

If you want help getting your calendar under control, set up a free 25-minute session. I’d love to talk time management with you. After all, it’s 2 pm on a Saturday and I’ve spent the morning enjoying a novel, I’ve put out a blog and I’ll be chillin’ watching the Super Bowl tomorrow.