Sharpening the Saw Too Much

Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People discusses sharpening the saw. The classic story is of a lumberjack working hard cutting some wood, and the foreman comes up and asks him why he doesn’t sharpen the saw he’s using to help speed up his work. The answer: “I’m too busy cutting wood to do so!”

The moral is clear: you can’t be effective at a task continuosly if you don’t sharpen your saw, usually by improving your skills or knowledge in some area. You should always supplement what you know with more knowledge. You should always be willing to learn new things.

Unfortunately I realized that my problem is that I spend way too much time sharpening the saw and not enough time practicing how to use it. I can learn all I want about test driven development or game design, but if I don’t apply what I am learning, if I don’t practice, then I just become a very knowledgable amateur. Being knowledgable means I have potential, but potential isn’t something I can directly leverage into be productive.

I’m going to set more concrete goals regarding the time I put in practicing what I learn. I don’t code nearly enough, so I can’t make any useful programs. I don’t flesh out game ideas often enough, so I can’t create useful game concepts.

At the same time, I don’t want to forget to sharpen the saw completely. I just need to start using it more.