by Jon Lloyd
How many minutes or hours do you have during the course of a week to learn these days? If you are like me, it's not a lot. When you look at your work schedule (meetings, conference calls, proposals to write, ppts and training content to create) and 'life' (kids, chores, honey-do's, gym, fixing those dang sprinklers again…), I'm sure that your days and weeks fill up pretty quickly (is it July already?).
So how do you actually learn new stuff or build upon your existing set of skills and competencies? Maybe it is a mentor at work, blogs, magazines, a class here or there.
How much learning actually sticks? Well, as with many questions in life, the answer is 'it depends.' If the topic you are learning is something that you are applying immediately to your work, then the studies around retention show a pretty high correlation to improvement in skills. That applies as well if it is a topic that you are deeply passionate about (photography for me), even if the concept is not applied soon after consumption. The retention rate outside of these bounds is pretty dismal.
What does this mean to learners and learning professionals? I've taken it to heart and started to really trim my consumption of materials. From over 150 blogs and at least 50 ezine subscriptions (ezine's are online magazines), I have cut back about 20% so far.
By constantly categorizing and moving the blogs that I find useful, interesting, engaging and innovating, up the list, I can continue to chop blogs that are just not improving my game. For ezines (and vendors that provide newsletters), I track the last few and see if any valuable information (industry, market, technique) 'changed my life' — if not, sorry. I think that Twitter, LinkedIn and FaceBook can be addressed in the same way.
That's my goal for getting some of my life back! What are you doing to organize your flow of informal learning?