“Sharpening the saw” is a term from “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”.
I’m lucky enough to get time in my day job to do this. Here’s how I use that time, specifically:
- Systems maintenance
- Learning
- Systems improvement
- Innovation
Systems Maintenance
This is the first priority during sharpening time. It means attending to natural breakages, accumulations of disorder & chaos.
Over time, systems naturally accumulate chaos. The work of maintenance is simply to bring a system back up to the status quo.
It does not mean going beyond to try to fundamentally improve a system (that comes later). However, sometimes it’s easier to replace a system instead of doing maintenance on it.
Examples:
- Doing a slower and more thorough GTD review & meditation
- Cleaning out my hard disk and deleting old files
- Fixing broken parts of my development environment
- Routine software & toolchain upgrades
Learning
Learning could mean learning to use my tools better, learning more about the codebase I work in, or more general learning that is still relevant to my daily work.
The idea here is to focus on key leverage points that amplify your ability to do the main workstream better.
If I use tools daily, learning to use them 1% or 5% better can yield impactful differences in what I can accomplish.
If I work in a codebase daily, improving my understanding of certain corners where I have shaky understanding can also be a force multiplier for how effectively I can work, and what kinds of projects I can contribute to.
Examples:
- Watching videos about Apple Notes/Notion/Miro to learn new features
- Asking AI to give me exercises to do to learn parts of the codebase better
Systems Improvement
For example, if you were cleaning up your note taking system, maintenance would look like cleaning things up within the existing system, but wouldn’t go as far as deeper thinking about whether you should fundamentally change the system, switch products, etc.
That’s the thinking that comes in the Systems Improvement phase, where you go one level deeper and examine the system holistically and consider larger scale changes, repairs, or improvements.
Maybe the system doesn’t even exist, which is an outstanding liability.
Examples:
- Should I completely switch from Apple Notes to Notion?
- I have no data backup strategy. What would a basic one look like?
Innovation
Innovation is taking time to explore new, experimental, or unconventional ideas that would never get prioritized into the main workstream. Nevertheless, these experiments can be significant points of leverage. (GMail came from Google’s “20% time”).