Most people build their learning list out of two bad sources. What the industry is excited about this year, and what they feel guilty about not knowing. Both give you a list that is long, unpleasant, and disconnected from your actual week.
There is a third source, and it is much better. What your team is going to need in a few months.
Something is always coming toward you, and it is usually visible well in advance if you look. The senior people keep arguing about the same thing in planning. A vendor sent an email about a version going out of support. A customer contract mentioned a requirement nobody on your team can spell. There is a migration that has been mentioned twice and scheduled once. Somebody keeps saying we will have to deal with that eventually. Your company posted a job advert for a skill nobody currently has.
Learn that. Not because it is noble, but because the return is enormous compared to the same hours spent on something abstract.
You get context, so the material makes sense instead of being a set of unattached facts. You get permission, because it is obviously work related and nobody has to be persuaded. You get real practice almost immediately, on a real system with real consequences, which is the only thing that converts reading into knowing. And when the work lands, you are the person who has already read the documentation, which is a genuinely different position to be standing in.
You do not need to become an authority. You need to be the second most informed person in the room, and that is usually a weekend of reading and one afternoon of trying it, not a term of study.
Then say it out loud. Mention in planning that you have been reading about it. That one sentence is what makes the difference between having learned something and being given the thing you learned.
Monday: find the item in your team's next quarter that nobody currently knows how to do, and spend two hours on it before anybody has to.
– Asael Shinder
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