Cutting through wood with a hand saw is a hard job. Pushing the blade back and forth through the wood slowly but surely making the cut deeper and deeper until it’s completed is a time consuming, labor intensive task. Once completed, there’s almost always another piece that needs to be cut.

Often in our daily tasks, we find ourselves pushing and pulling the saw blade back and forth, moving a project along towards it’s expected completion date. As soon as that project is completed, often before it’s completed, another one presents itself and requires our attention. This is very similar to cutting through the log. We often feel taking even the shortest break will put us off our course, the work will pile up, and we’ll never get it all done.

You’re wrong. Sharp tools cut faster.

Franklin Covey has taught us this already. Taking a 10-20 minute break to sharpen the saw can make the cutting process go faster. Increasing productivity and of course resulting in completing the tasks quicker. Taking the time to obtain the needed skills is a hard discipline, but it must be done and done now!

Think about your current and future task list. Now, take 10 minutes to think about your most mundane task and research to see if there’s a book, course, webinar or other resource you can tap to learn more about it. Even the most cursory overview will teach you some nuance that improves your productivity - sometimes - you’ll learn your understanding of a topic is really far more basic than you realize. The added time spent on yourself will help you to complete that mundane task perhaps a little more efficiently, giving you more time to complete the task at hand.

What saw am I sharpening?

I’ve been writing simple, and some not so simple, CRUD (CReate Update Delete) SQL for most of my professional career. I find it boring and tedious, but a necessary evil in the Web 2.0 world. This week I started reading Refactoring SQL Applications by Stéphane Faroult and Joe Celko’s Thinking in Sets. What I found was that many applications I’ve seen (and written) hardly tap the power of SQL and that there are some major mistakes that the PHP/Perl/ColdFusion/ASP.NET/C# programming manuals proliferate in the over simplification of relational database design. I’m now realizing that the majority of code I’ve seen and worked on is actually using SQL as a giant persistent hashmap!

These books are causing me to think about not just the CRUD statements differently, but how my applications interact with the persistent storage engines web apps interact with every day.

Take a few minutes today to sharpen your saw.

Tags: database, education, efficiency, productivity, self help

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 at 4:38 pm and is filed under small business, sql. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.