"If I only had an hour to chop down a tree, I would spend the first 45 minutes sharpening my axe.”
– Abraham Lincoln.
You have free time on your hands. Project delays, slow sales, “it’s that time of year” and other factors mean that we have odd blocks of free time on our hands.
When this occurs, do you sit on your hands or do you turn to your wish list of skills and accomplish something? Are you tied into your branch sales team so that you can offer your free time to help them?
Barring some uber-exciting sales call, you should have a prioritized list of learning tasks, lab experiments, or technical/business reading queued up for just these occasions. Learn something new. Hit up the MVA, read some tech blogs, review Dale Carnegie and Steven Covey.
The bottom line is that you, and you alone, are responsible for keeping your axe sharp. No one else is going to do it. You need to have a plan of action, in advance, for filling in the slack time in your schedule with something productive that will move YOUR career along.
Don’t just sit there watching the paint dry, get ready for the next tree.
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