I have a confession: most of what I do on a daily basis is not high-level talent development. A significant chunk of my professional life involves grunt work. I analyze reports, enter data into our learning management system, review task lists and project milestones, and build slide decks.
All of those activities take real time. But, I’ve discovered that a relatively small time investment in mastering my technology tools has dramatically decreased how long it takes me to do that work.
As a simple example, every two weeks I run a report on the progress of our leadership development cohorts. Those reports require a lot of finessing. The data that comes out of our LMS needs to be cleaned up because we’ve structured our learning experiences in creative ways that the system wasn’t designed for out of the box. Then, we need to parse that data for a variety of audiences. Our business leaders need an overview of how their people are progressing. The individual participants need reminders about their next action items. The managers of the participants need discussion guides so they can reinforce what their team members have learned during their next 1:1 conversations.
All together, reporting for this one program could easily take several hours each time. But, I’ve invested in learning how to use my tools to streamline this work. What used to take hours can now be done in 20 minutes.
I’ve found improvements like this throughout my work. Sometimes it’s as simple as mastering a series of keyboard shortcuts to turn 10 second actions into a single second. Other times, the improvements come in large chunks. But all of these add up. In a typical week, I can easily point to at least four hours of time that I saved by learning my tools at a higher level. That’s at least 10% of my work time that is freed up for higher-level tasks.
In short, I can spend time experimenting with new techniques, learning from others in the profession, and doing more high-level talent development work because I squeeze more out of my tools. I am a craftsman, and I can afford the time to master my craft because I have the discipline to master my tools.