How do you keep up?

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[b][i]"I'm interested to hear how everyone does it. How do you do it? How do you keep up?"[/i][/b]

Look, buddy, this is not the right kind of website to be asking questions like THAT!!

:^0 :^0 :^0

Keeping up is not so hard I used to be like that, strees, panic, getting behind!!
Well I took a Time Management Course, took the material to heart and now several years later I am doing more, learning more and enjoying myself more!
So do a Time Management Coarse, do it with an open mind, put it into practice and soon you to will be better off!!
Kevin

Focus on the technologies that are core to your business/interest. Obviously these will have to be identified. Make time to get clued up on those.
There will be technologies that are nice to know but not essential. Your focus on these will be secondary to those that are core.
Encourage the team to make some time for investigating new technologies. Maybe 2-3hrs per week.

Keeping up from a technical point of view needs a road map for where you are going technically and then finding some resources, such as TR or possibly more tightly focusedto take the grunt research out.

Keeping up with your industry, should already be happening. Product development, QA, Marketting and sales should already be on top of that, get yourself in the loop.

Keeping up with customers is best done by talking to 'erm customers. If you have nothing in place get a feedback mechanism on to your website, always a good start. Again some business types should be on top of that as well.

I would recommend that you allocate 30 minutes a day for staying abreast of new technology and trends. I would also suggest you recommend the same to the staff. This way, you have given them an official mandate to keep up, but also restricted the time commitment.

As for data sources, try to find a few free industry publications in your area. These will often give a high level overview of the topics of the day. They won't give a lot of detail, but you can scan through them in about 10 minutes and see what people are talking about. I prefer to got the hardcopy versions and opt out of the daily e-mails - sometimes I'm just too busy to read the e-mails and they clog up my in box. If too many magazines pile up, don't feel embarrassed to throw them out unread.

If you find a topic where you want more detailed information, do a Google search. There are lots of free online tutorials. I usually print them out and read at my leisure.

If there is an area where you may be taking action in the next 6 - 12 months, call up some vendor reps. Most are more than happy to come by to provide a briefing for a group. It is often quite enlightening to see the tools for a technology in action.

Recognize that keeping up is part of the job and schedule some time for it. Pick an otherwise slow time, beginning of the day, lunch time, or whenever, and spend the time. It is okay to skip your research time once in a while, but don't make it a habit. It may help if you add a reminder in a calendar program. Finally, stick to your time limit - you can get lost for days chasing interesting links.

You touched on the main one: Newsletters. Just glimpsing the topics being discussed and new technologies plants the seed of an idea/ technology that may meet a need that comes up.

Podcasts, or any other way of getting info you can listen to, etc is useful.

Sales Reps - I take the time up front to explain my business, my demands, my needs, and long term goals to my core sales Reps / account exec's - Microsoft, Altiris, Dell, and occasionally some other IT consultants.

If they have a clear picture of what my needs are, they can keep me up to speed in areas that will benefit me. I make sure they understand my time constraints and let them know when they annoy me with junk I don't need. Those sales reps don't get calls returned, and always have to leave messages.

I add a variety of RSS feeds for all sorts, some I just scan over, some I actually follow the links, some I actually read the site in a little bit of spare time over lunch or late in the evening.

Microsoft feeds for all technologies I support (Exchange/ISA/Security/MOM...etc) helps for work & knowing about new stuff like beta releases.
Feeds from other companies who we use (or I am interested in)

Feeds to IT "releated" news sites (Slashdot/The Register...etc) to get the lowdown on tech stuff that's about, plus the obvious emails from Techrepublic!!

This is an easy way to get a bit of info about a lot of stuff. If I'm interested I'll try to read up on it in some "spare" time (all the pdf's on my desktop show this isn't long enough)

1. Day of rest. If you allow everyone sometime to themselves they may be amenable to being proactive in their self-development. This includes you. Read Steven Covey '7 Habits of Highly Effective People'. The content that relates most to your question is anything about 'sharpening your saw'. Put aside a small handful of time each day or week or month to learn, read, attend a conference, meet a client, discuss new things which may be on their way to you. It is a habit and you must not be ashamed of indulging it just because it is not about today's problem.
2. Subscribe to services of informed bodies such as consultants,specialist websites, user groups. Be prepared to pay for these services, if necessary, especially if you want your understanding to be deeper and more appropriate for your goals.
3. Your goals. Have you a strategy? Does your company have one? Find out what it is you are expected to achieve in the short, medium and longer term. Make this part of your guide. What are the goals of your customers? Talk to them or to people in your organisation who know them.

It is such a good question to set out with and if you can sustain this questioning approach it will get you quite some way to sorting your true problem.

An earlier poster talked about time management. Alongside that is setting an environment, both among your team and among your clients (users), that fosters healthy expectations. Two common attitudes among users is that everything is a crisis, or at the other extreme, they don't want to bother you even if they can't do their job. You didn't mention how change requests are filed with your department, but it's important to specify an organized policy. Users who follow the policy will get their requests responded to first - those who don't will have to wait.

Second, it's up to you to prioritize what's really a critical fix and what's a nice to have. Third, know your team. Know what they can handle and how quickly they can address certain problems. The request policy is needed to keep them from being constantly distracted. If a user's request is not critical, give them a realistic time to completion with the understanding that it may become delayed if a lot of job-stopping problems come up in the meantime. When you are factoring this ETD, include 5-10% more time for professional development. By including it as part of the project time, you'll be setting realistic expectations for the users, while still allowing your team to discover up to date methods and trends that will make everybody happy in the long run. Oh, and don't forget to encourage your team to submit their own change requests based on things they've discovered.

I've been in the IT biz in one capacity or another for about 30 years now. That's right, since about the mid-70's, when PCs were a hobbyist curiosity and mainframe dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Let me tell you, it's beyond overwhelming, it's beyond information overload.

I used to worry a lot about it, I kept every periodical, every book, every white paper, etc. etc., just in case I needed to refer to it later. Then I would forget I had them. I would set aside time to keep up and read all I could. Then I would forget a lot of the stuff I read, because I never actually used the info. It became increasingly stressful as I realized that more and more new stuff was coming out all the time, far more than I could ever hope to deal with.

Still, I tried to keep up. I subscribed to more magazines. I went to more seminars and expos. I bought even more books to stock my already sagging shelves. I took IT classes, especially when M$ came out with NT, and studied even harder to get certified. I was spending more and more time dealing with the tidal wave of information in order to "keep up". Hundreds of companies coming up with thousands of products, each one having spent years of development using TEAMS of developers, and here I was, one lone individual, trying to take it all in.

I finally realized that most of the stuff I was trying to deal with was .... irrelevent. I also found more and more that a lot of the stuff was just variations of the same basic theme over and over again. I realized that I had enough of an experience and knowledge base that I didn't have to try to "keep up". What was important was that I was able to deal with whatever came up, come up to speed on an as needed basis, and not worry about it.

Now I spend very little time scanning through the industry mags. I've got better things to do with my life.

Don't worry about it.

Hi
I use IEEE to keep track of some of the Technology developments.

Business aspects of technology and its application, I use meetings (local chapters of professional orgs), vendors and research firms like gartner etc. I do not have access to Gartner, however you could see what's the buzz about.

I have been using LinkedIn as a new source of connecting to people to ask questions and provide answers.

Gupta Boda
http://www.linkedin.com/in/guptabs
http://www.linkedin.com/in/guptabs

Time management might be relevant in terms of finding time to keep up.

Other than that it's irrelevant to this discussion, unless of course you are keeping up with developments in time management. :D

I have been in the industry a long time, starting at a time before PC's came out. The core principles have not changed as dramatically as the new IT people would think.

I have found that changes are not as big a deal as the hype would indicate. For all of the advanced technology yet to come, it is all based on what we already know.

An example is floppy drives. I remember using 8 inch floppies for booting peripherals. PC's came along and used 5 1/4 inch floppies to do the same thing. When IBM came out with PS2 the floppy shrunk to 3 1//2 inches. The weird thing that happened was the capacity increase as the size of the floppy decreased. But, it was used the same way from 8 inch to 3 1/2 inch. Sure, the write protection scheme changed, but it is a minor change.

The other thing that happens with new technology is that it is simpler to use. 30 years ago a tech had to really know math and electronics, now the old skills are not needed because components can be changed out instead of being repaired and applications can be reinstalled instead of debugged.

If you want to keep up, master what is current and be ready to adapt when small things change. Most new things are just gimmicks to get people to upgrade their systems. Sometimes the gimmick is good and sometimes it makes things worse.

Sites like TR are good to get a broad base of what is changing as well as solutions to problems.

In my company, the current problem is to help newcomers ramp up to speed as quickly as possible. We have certain tasks that are deemed appropriate for beginners but we fail to document those tasks properly for the newcomers.

The newcomers have to ask everyone to help them learn what they could figure out if they had the documentation. To that end, I have established a "work server" to act as a repository of information and documentation. This is still evolving.

Time is a scarce resource that needs to be managed properly. Ignore that to your peril.

I have yet to see anyone whose role in life is to use or save time. That's just plain semantics. You might be, for example, be required to complete a project at a specific time. Completing it earlier, you might save costs and reduce risk exposure and thus save the project not time. In that way you have used time to your advantage.