So what?

As I was working on a presentation I walked through my planned sequence asking the question, “So what?” What was important about this information? How did it apply to the individuals listening to the presentation? Through this I came up with three personal stories to inject into my presentation that made it much more engaging and memorable. These stories also helped me better internalize the information. A simple walkthrough and question provided the elements that connected the audience to me and the material.

If you don't have an expert, use someone who knows more than you

I was following written instructions and noted several discrepancies. I noted the questions and later met with someone one year more experienced than me on the job. He quickly explained that I had discovered several inconsistencies and told me to disregard. He also pointed out a few key concepts that I needed to focus on. One morning of working with a friend gave me two months of guidance.

It's also what you choose not to do

I received a request that at first glance appeared to be a lot of work with something I'm not familiar. I knew I had bigger priorities so I reached out to someone familiar with my situation. This person gave me several key insights and prevented me from spending any time on a very low value task. In fact, the requester completely forgot and hasn’t brought the task up in more than a month. This is one of the great benefits of Pareto analysis applied to life. Unimportant tasks can fall to the wayside leaving more, valuable time for critical tasks.

What and Why

I attended a training session that included opening presentations and instruction followed by hands-on lab work, all completed remotely by web conference. The lab consisted of a script to follow with software in a demo environment. The script provided an excess of information that distracted from the core goal of becoming familiar with the software. The greatest benefit of the training came from reading the lab overview and following the prescribed steps through the software. In other words answering the ‘what’ and ‘why’ and then stepping through the interface provided the most learning. All the other details were less critical to the core concepts and quickly forgotten. Thus spending any serious time focused on those non-core details was inefficient.