From the course: Time Management Tips

Prioritizing learning opportunities

From the course: Time Management Tips

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Prioritizing learning opportunities

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- Learning is wonderful, right? That's why you're here on a site like this because you're hungry for knowledge that you want to improve yourself and grow in your career. What about when your eyes are bigger than your stomach? So to speak, when it comes to your ability to learn. As a speaker and a trainer, I occasionally see this. People who get in the habit of going to so many conferences, or going through so many courses that it becomes overwhelming to them. And they're unable to follow through and take action on what they're learning. This is neither ideal, nor productive. When considering learning opportunities first, ask yourself, what result am I trying to achieve? Just, filling up your mind with knowledge in and of itself, is not a virtue. You want to be focused with your time. So, consider this question for a period of time. For instance, over the next month. What result are you trying to achieve? During this month, what are you trying to learn for yourself about your career? What will make the biggest difference and is most closely related to your most valuable activities? Later, you can continue to ask that question for longer time periods. What's most important for me to learn this quarter, or this year? Your answer to this question will help you prioritize the different options that you have. Next, take a look at how many learning opportunities you can give attention to given the available time in your schedule. For every course that you see here on the library in general, I encourage you to estimate that it's going to take you twice as long. So if the course is listed as one hour at length it's probably going to take you two hours to go through it. Why? Well you want to have time to digest what you're learning, to take action on it, to complete the quizzes that you see and, to just breathe. In the same respect, if we're talking about going to live conferences or events, be realistic about how much time you have and overestimate how much time it will take you to get to one of these, and also recover from them. Next, ask yourself the action question. Am I going to be able to take action on this? When you have more to do than you have time to do it, it's time to slow down. If you're finding that courses and conferences are giving you more and more things to do and you're still falling behind on the stuff that you've already learned in the last training opportunity, it's a good sign you should apply the brakes. You can always resume learning and, gradually add opportunities back onto your schedule once you've caught up. Knowledge is powerful as long as you can take action upon it. Make sure that the time you set aside for learning also includes time set aside to do something about it.

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