- Image by The Library of Congress via Flickr
I have learned over the years that although it sucks doing dirty work, it is very necessary when I want to truly understand something. This means rolling up my sleeves and hand jamming or manually searching and compiling data to answer a question that I am curious about. It is very tedious, but I would also argue that shortcuts taken at the beginning of any project will only come back to haunt you sometime during the project.
Past Dirty Work
For me, doing dirty work started out meaning that I would retype documents that could have been cut and pasted. That’s crazy talk, you may be thinking, but I have found that the act of keying information really helps me retain it. I have done this to Requests for Proposal when I was an Acquisitions Officer in the Air Force, and I did it while creating a study guide prior to taking the Project Management Professional (PMP) Exam. It sucks because it is a slow process, but it definitely works.
Doing dirty work has also meant looking people up, on-line, on an individual basis. When I was starting to build out my LouisvillePM community, I realized that Social Networks are just massive searchable databases that would allow me to find and link with people in a one to one setting. Reaching out to 600 people individually takes a lot of time and effort… but it also taught me a lot about the wording needed to take people from one social network, and have them join another one for a niche interest.
Current Dirty Work
This weekend, I spent a lot of time looking things up on-line. Friday night was devoted to researching the Thesis blog theme, which after digging deeper looks tremendous by the way. Saturday and Sunday was spent looking up bloggers and their respective twitter accounts talking about the National Basketball Association and its teams. This has to do with my idea crush that has consumed my free time. It wasn’t hard work, but it took a lot of time to map out the portion of the space that I feel the need to understand as rapidly as possible.
My best advice is to start small when researching a niche. Much like the game of Risk, if you are able to take ground in a certain area of the map, you can then calculate your next moves easier.
NERDS!
So that’s what’s been going on with me lately, as pathetic as that may sound. How bout you? Have you rolled up your sleeves lately to get your hands dirty with data? How do you approach it? Please share your tips in the comments below.
