I sometimes forget that I love what I do, but not everyone does. I recently met a couple of programmers/designers/geeks at a social gathering who would like to have been doing anything but what they were. I of course tried to bond with my fellow brothers and sisters of the keyboard and started asking about what they are working on and what I am working on. I was shocked to find the abundance of what I consider older/obsolete technologies/tools and no desire what so ever to learn anything new or upgrade their skills. Some of us are fortunate to get paid for what we do for free, but there are always those who just want to pay the bills and learn only what they need to. This got me to thinking, what does it take to keep up/ahead of the edge (as in cutting or bleeding).

As a consultant, many of my friends have commented on the few hours of day I work. This is true if we are talking about billable hours. The unfortunate thing with being a freelancer is you don’t have a huge company to back you. This means I get the jobs on my own merit, or the merit of a close small group around me. This means I have to know what I am talking about and I have to be on top of stuff. That boils down to a lot more then you think.

Lets break it down shall we:

RSS : I use Google Reader to monitor 123 RSS feeds for blogs I read. Some of which publish 10 – 20 articles a day! I check my reader for probably an hour a day reading about new technologies/trends/opinions/commentary.

Google Groups: I subscribe to 22 google groups for discussions on new software tools, standards, communities… you name it, I am reading about it. I probably spend 20 to 30 minutes a day on the groups catching up on conversations..

Podcasts: I subscribe to 16 podcasts about technology. Thats roughly 16 hours of content that I go through a week. Of course I do this while working so it is sort of double time, but it is still a lot of audio to get through.

Lynda: I try and go through about an hour a day in training videos for different programs to keep up with everything. When something like the new Adobe suite came out that was hundreds of hours of new content that I watch.

Safarri: I use this as kind of a backup reference or for cross referencing. I don’t really read books from start to finish, but I could if I wanted to

So that is 33.5 hours per week. One and a quarter days a week of education. I don’t think this is necessarily a freelancer or consultant thing, although I imagine if I had a 9 to 5 it would be way harder to find time for those hours without becoming a complete recluse. I am not saying it is for everyone, I am sure there are a lot of successful people who put in less and a lot of unsuccessful people that put in more, but it makes you stop and think about what do you as a profession and how if the key to doing better at what you do is by knowing more, shouldn’t you also be doing something you love so it is actually interesting?