Alyson asks:

“Other than the simple “just do it”, I’d love to hear how other people keep up with professional issues. How much time does it take each week? Do you set time aside, or do you just do it when you feel like it? How do you keep track of it all?”

Lately there’s been a lot of articles advocating library 2.0 in 15 minutes a day, 23 things, and other keep-up hacks, but for me keeping up to date is something that happens through the day, every day. Most things I read come through my aggregator - blogs, links to articles, newsletters; sometimes Twitter, although I do still subscribe to a few email lists. I read them in chunks at lunch, at home and on weekends. I don’t put a time limit on it, but I probably spend a few hours every week.

I don’t try to keep up with everything - I have a few favourite topics like library 2.0, leadership, presentations and life hacks that I follow.

What happens to that information? Not much. I could do more to consolidate and write up what I’m reading about, perhaps as summaries on Libraries Interact where I also write. I’ve often wanted to see more reflective content on blogs - but I could be providing that myself.

I worked on the same conference as Alyson last year, and have found that my free time now is just as limited as then, even though I don’t have so many after work commitments now (we had a lot of meetings!) This year, I’m down to three committees (last year it was 6), but study is what’s taking most of my free time. I get home and hit the books every day. It has been hard to adjust back to having coursework deadlines and assigned reading every week. I’m studying via distance, and I find using discussion boards (my school uses WebCT) more time consuming than going to a tutorial and lecture for a couple of hours - it has to be checked every day too. I expect that as I get further into the semester my reading speed will pick up. It’s amazing how you can lose the ability to scan an article when you spend more time reading blogs and articles online. So far, I’m keeping up and it has been really interesting.