Yesterday as I was cruising through a normal Friday, I was able to sit in on a product demo.
I enjoy going to these. It’s usually a great way to learn more about what your company does and see the latest updates.
I also trying to pull at least one actionable item out of meetings like this that I can take back to my own work.
One of my roles is a dashboard developer for our internal use. Another is market segmentation for sales.
So I’m listening and getting some good notes about who to target for these particular products.
And then I see something small happen on screen that changed my day.
A simple right-click option I hadn’t seen before in my own development. (We’re new to the software.)
The presenter brushed over it pretty quickly, but I immediately pinged one of my leaders and called it out.
“I’ve got to learn how to do that. It’s so powerful.”
As I’m reflecting on it today, it also made me realize something about learning.
Sometimes as we’re going through a topic we don’t know what we don’t know.
There are different stages of knowledge integration.
So here I am in this “unconscious incompetence” stage and I had rapidly dumped into “conscious incompetence”.
So I moved from “don’t know what I don’t know” to realizing I don’t know something.
Now arriving in the “conscious incompetence” stage can often leave people feeling embarrassed that they don’t know something.
But somehow my mind just gets excited about that.
When I hit this stage, I know I’m about to learn something new.
I won’t stay in the “conscious incompetence” stage for very long (if it’s a subject I’m interested in).
So I change my course.
I adjust to account for this new demand and integrate this learning into the projects I’m currently working on.
I didn’t join that meeting on Friday thinking about how I was going to turn the whole user experience of my dashboards on it’s head.
But that’s what happened. I can easily see the value of knowing how to use this new technique.
So when I hit the ground running on Monday, that’s going to be a primary focus. (And to be honest, I may figure out how to do some of it today.)
But back to the blog.
My productivity system needs to be able to handle shifts like that as well.
The last thing I want is to learn something new, shift my focus and suddenly not be able to deliver on my prior commitments.
That applies with my mornings as well.
If you’ve got questions or something you’d like to learn more about feel free to reach out to [email protected]
P.S. If you’re curious of the technique, it’s PowerBI’s drillthrough functionality. I won’t leave you hanging.
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