Ok, so if you’ve noticed, I haven’t really posted all that much over the last couple of months…free time certainly does have something to do with it, but I think the real issue is that I’m not doing very much tech stuff that would be interesting to post about. I can’t really talk about my research project because it involves some confidential information and such, so that’s out, and right now, there aren’t really a lot of things, life wise, going on that would be of interest. One thing I’ve been wanting to do is to work through the ton of self-help / personal productivity books (e.g. Getting Things Done, How to Win Friends & Influence People, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, etc.) so what I’m planning on doing is allocating some team each week to make progress on those books (and perhaps some websites will be included too if useful) and then I’ll try to condense the knowledge into a blog post (e.g. 1 or 2 chapters condensed into a page or so). Of course, this isn’t a substitute for reading the books (the two I mentioned are great BTW), but maybe it’ll be helpful to some of you out there – and it’ll get me going towards my goal of getting more professional development into my week and keep my blog active – so a win-win. 🙂 I’m probably going to start next week, so be watching for these new posts…hopefully they will provide some new perspectives – I know I completely missed a lot of this stuff in my CS program since business and professional development isn’t even an afterthought in technical programs.
If any of this is interesting to you, you should check out “The Personal MBA” (http://personalmba.com) there are some great links there about business & professional development – tons of topics. It’s a fairly new online community so it’s still growing, but it’s certainly worth a look as-is. One thread there was all about “Does College Matter?” which was interesting. (I believe college is extremely important – depending on what you want to do and the effort you’re willing to put into it. If you’re not going to put forth the effort and just want to party, then no, you’re going to get out what you put in which won’t be anything of value. But if you work to make the most of the experience, then you’ll get more value than you can imagine. The other thing people miss is that they feel college is teaching you material – which it does to some degree – but the key point of college is to teach you to learn – NOT teach you subject X…but that’s a post for another day. 🙂 )
More to come…soon…