I read a nice lament about Time Management at Matt Casto's blog and wanted to give my own 'Time Management' tip, specific to .net geeks like you and I:

Make a list of what you DON'T have to do.

have you heard the saying:

"you don't know what you do until you know what you don't do!"?

for us .net geeks it's important to regularly say:

"okay, here's are some cool and fascinating technologies that i would learn if i had the time, but i'm NOT going to learn them, because I am but a single humble limited human being, not all things to all people"

My Current list of "WON'T DO" learning items is:

Microsoft Robotics Studio
Iron Python
Haskell
Windows CardSpace
Virtual Earth (leave that to the team at Alive Dev.)
Windows Workflow Foundation
Ruby On Rails

And then a second list:

"here's some great stuff that I'm NOT going to learn in depth just yet, because they're still too new. For now, I only need to know the basics"

Silverlight
Iron Ruby
SQL 2008
VS 2008

And then I tell myself:

"When they are more mature they will be easier to learn, and more fun to use"

Remember how frustrating XAML was when the tool support was absent? Remember writing WSDL files in notepad? Did you ever try to use Notepad to write windows forms? It's not a good way to spend your years! There is a benefit, but it's outweighed by the cost. When a technology goes from 'bleeding edge' to usable... well there's a lot less bleeding involved!

If I am suddenly thrust into a project where I'm expected to KNOW these technologies inside-out YESTERDAY!... I'll be okay. We are all masters of "Just In Time" learning. It's cool. We can handle it.

If you still feel overwhelmed by the pressure to keep up... go back and read 'You Are Not Inadequate'.

(End of feel-good-pep-talk-for-my-own-benefit-following-teched-overload)

(p.s. Similarly there is a list of web pages that i stop myself from visiting. XKCD. Icanhascheezburger. YouTube. WorseThanFailure. If someone has a funny XKCD comic to show me -- i ask them to email it to me, rather than let myself get drawn into that vortex...)

(p.p.s. The title 'Look at all the things I'm NOT doing' is taken from something DHH said in a popular webcast where he's building a blog engine from scratch using ror. In my head, i can hear his voice saying it now.)

Oh, so instead you kill *my* productivity!! I never knew about xkcd until this post, but because of your recommendation...;)

As a disturbing aside, my wife laughed out loud at the LISP cartoon, indicating I talk about code at home *WAY TOO MUCH*

Sorry Justice. i did my best to not make you go there -- i didn't provide a link or nothing. Well now you've got some serious backlogs to trawl through.

For me, slashdot was the time killer. If I ever did anything useful with my time, I'd congratulate myself for forswearing slashdot.

Oh, and thank you for acknowledging Haskell's existence. *sigh*

Just for the heck of it, I'm going to argue with you and claim that IronPython should not be on your todon't list. Seriously, it's very cool and very useful and productivity as a .NET developer has without a doubt increased because of it. If I were to make a "must know" list for .NET developers, I'd stick it on there for a variety of reasons:

1. Python is easy enough to pick up in a very short amount of time. I learned it well enough to be productive in just some free time over a weekend. As a .NET developer, you get to apply your framework knowledge for free.

2. The dynamic interpreted environment and integration with .NET makes it a great prototyping, testing, and learning tool.

3. The engine is incredibly simple to integrate with .NET applications. It's a few lines of C# code to create the engine, add some of your objects to the environment, and then evaluate Python code in the context of your app.

4. It's great as an interpreter for writing one-off utility scripts. As a .NET developer, I know how to do all sorts of file manipulation, web requests, XML processing, etc. using .NET. IronPython allows me to use this knowledge in a simple and pleasant yet powerful language.

I gave in to the dark side over a year ago and read the entire archive of XKCD. Now I just subscribe to the feed and see any new comics.

I did forswear Slashdot and some others. Recently I stopped reading LifeHacker because the signal to noise ratio went way down.

>> If you still feel overwhelmed by the pressure to keep up... go back and read 'You Are Not Inadequate'.

The link to 'You Are Not Inadequate' is stuck way down on the home page. Even on my 1600x1200 screen you have to scroll down to find it. It should be given pride of place near the top, as it's one of the best things you've ever done, and something I have to revisit every few months.

Great post.

I've recently decided that as much as I want to learn a functional programming language (Erlang, F#, Scheme, etc.), that it's just not the best way to use my limited free time.

I'll get a lot more mileage out of learning Ruby on Rails, for example (which I also find very interesting).

regarding learning lisp (or scheme) -- i often see citations of this quote from eric s. raymond:

"LISP is worth learning for a different reason — the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it. That experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use LISP itself a lot."

(from 'How to become a hacker') (notable cited by (paul (graham)) in 'beating the averages' (http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html)

the claim eric makes is more poetic than factual i think. it's a seductive idea: we'd all like to be better programmers for the rest of our days. but there's no metric around what this means or any evidence that lisp will get you there.

>So...what IS on your list

WPF.
Expression Blend.
Linq.
More ajax.net
scheme.
lua.
powershell.

just little things.

I'll agree with you on ichc, but there's no way that XKCD can be considered a timewaster.

Well, unless you look at the archives. :)

Look at all the things I'm NOT doing!

Make a list of what you DON'T have to do.

"okay, here's are some cool and fascinating technologies that i would learn if i had the time, but i'm NOT going to learn them, because I am but a single humble limited human being, not all things to all people"

"here's some great stuff that I'm NOT going to learn in depth just yet, because they're still too new. For now, I only need to know the basics"

"When they are more mature they will be easier to learn, and more fun to use"

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