Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

How do you keep up to date in our constantly changing industry? Here’s some of the things I do, often on a daily basis, just to stay on top of what’s happening, as part of the process of developing the program for our conferences like the upcoming Direction (just on a month away now, do you have your ticket yet?)

* I follow well over a thousand people on twitter (and frequently retweet things I find useful). Why not follow me, and Web Directions on Twitter?

* I have an RSS feed (remember them, still incredibly valuable, particularly with a service like Feedly, which I really recommend) of hundreds of sites

* I clip dozens of articles to Evernote a week (I also share some of these weekly in our newsletter–do you get it? Why not sign up now?)

* I watch presentations from many conferences and meetups

* I read numerous books

* I attend (far fewer than I’d like to) conferences and meetups

which only scratches the surface. And keeping up is a huge part of my job, so that I can help others in our field keep up to date.

I genuinely know both how important it is for others in our field to stay on top of changes, and how much work it is. Which is one of the principal reasons I organise our conferences, like our upcoming conference Direction.

The other 1%

My rule of thumb is attending a major conference of ours is an investment of around 1% of someone’s time and income each year, and I really work hard (as Tim Ferriss might say) to ’10x’ that investment. Frankly, if what we deliver isn’t worth many many times what you, or your employer invests in your attending, we honestly shouldn’t be doing it. Those returns on the investment are in you

• being able to keep ahead of the curve,
• not wasting precious time on approaches, technologies, and strategies that might have a lot of hype, but don’t really deliver.
• uncovering “hacks”, ideas, and approaches that deliver big results fast for your company, organisation or clients

and not least of all, in energising and inspiring, not just through amazing presentations, but throughout the whole event.

As you probably know, we’ve made a few changes in how we run our events for 2016, and we’re incredibly excited about the single track, “all keynote” style of the program, which so many people had been asking for. So why not take a look at the amazing array of sessions we have planned?

Want more?

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