Last weekend, I went to my first WordCamp. These events take place around the country, and are an opportunity for people who use WordPress to meet and learn. A lot of the sessions at WordCamp Denver 2015 had little to do with WordPress and building websites. Before I left, I wrote down two goals inspired by WordCamp speakers.
Goal One: Schedule time to learn something every day.
Brian Richards’ talk was titled “Learn Something Useful Every Day.” He pointed out that, ” You must make time to learn. It doesn’t happen by accident.” That was the kick I needed to add learning to my schedule. I’m starting easy: I am a lifetime member of Train Simple, an online library of training videos for Adobe software. But I rarely visit the site. My plan is to start each day with a few videos on software I want to learn more about.
I’ll also start a list (in my beloved Evernote) to remember all the random things I want to learn about. When I have time, I’ll be able to review the list and find something that interests me at that moment.
Goal Two: Write about the things I learn.
Brian Richards mentioned writing things down in a blog to share your knowledge with others and to help out yourself when you need to repeat a task. Patrick Rauland spoke about the same thing (with the added bonus of building credibility) in “How My Blog Got Me a Job and a Book Deal.”
While I often document the steps to solve problems, I haven’t been sharing those with people I don’t know. But I have this Freelance Q&A blog sitting here. So I’ll be adding posts to share the things I learn about freelancing here. Once my new company site is up, I’ll also be adding posts over there about subjects that will interest my clients and potential clients.
What about you?
What things do you do to learn and share your knowledge?