How To Make Your Work More Valuable

I often ask myself those two simple questions to make my work more fun and productive. If you first relax and then ponder them for a while, you will find yourself reenergized with new possibilites.  I know. We techies don’t usually do that.  Try it. I’m sure that after thinking about it for a while you will find a lot more fun and energy in your work.

Why do you like doing your work?

How does it impact the lives of people that use it every day?

Don’t be afraid to go deeper. Get more general.  Expand the context.

It’s easy to say that you’re just working with a data or a system. It’s also very boring. Each piece of data has a meaning and every system is a tool. Define it in your own terms, find a new possibilites.

You will discover all those small details that you can improve. Little things that makes huge difference.

Sometimes it’s as small as choosing just the right color in the right place. Looking at a data from a diffrent perspective. Discovering that you can make something easier to understand.

I just love the whole process of creating something. Figuring out how to put pieces together. Learning and discovering problems and solutions.

I like the other part too. Getting to know my users. Learning how do they work and how can I make it easier.

If you understand your work a little bit more every day, you will make it more valuable to YOU and to others.

P.S.

Leave me a comment below and tell me why do you enjoy doing the work and how is it useful for others?

Thanks,

Kuba

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

7 comments

  1. I’m very fascinated from the power of mapping environment expecially from human point of view. I think that observing the world around us we can change our bed behaviors.

    Thanks for your comment.

  2. Hi Kuba,
    Thanks for this article! I enjoyed how you described how you engage creatively with your work and through diving deeper find more meaning in it! I relate very much to what you’ve said. I think I have a keen eye for how to improve GIS workflows, especially through creating customized tools in ArcGIS using python. Not only have I been able to provide value to my organization by improving efficiency and quality of the creation of deliverables, but I also find it personally meaningful to create a script that can solve a particular process problem.

  3. Thanks Kuba
    I love your insight into wanting to improve the quality of the map, and also to better understand how to make the system easier for end users to be able to operate. Crunching data, and tweaking systems can become very boring unless we remember the end user that we are intending to make an easier system to use or better map to read.

  4. Couldn’t agree more. I’ve found that to be really effective in GIS, I must become very familiar with the requestor’s workflow and needs, NOT just blindly follow requests. We can often then suggest better ways to accomplish things than what they first had in mind.

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