Learning When There’s No Time To Learn

How do you make time to learn when your e-mail box is overflowing and your to do list is ever growing? It’s a problem for everyone, including those who work in the field of philanthropy.

GrantCraft asked their readers how they think about time and how they manage it. More than 1,400 of their subscribers replied. Their general consensus was:

What matters is how people use time to learn and make sense of learning, individually and across a team or organization.

As one respondent put it, “Work never ends, and so we need to learn to manage our time to include learning on the job.”

Four lessons came out of the survey. Each is listed below with one reply illustrating how a respondent incorporates the lesson into their everyday work.

Lesson 1: Establish a culture of learning by building learning into routine processes.

Build in opportunities for learning as you go. Sometimes there isn’t time to do a long reflection process at the end of a project, but there can surely be steps along the way where everyone takes time to observe the knowledge exchange that is happening.

Lesson 2: Raise the profile of learning by noticing when it happens and naming it explicitly.

Start and end meetings with questions like, ‘If there’s one thing you’d like to say to others doing a similar thing, what would it be?’ – in other words, quick things that force people to be analytical.

Lesson 3: Cultivate personal habits of learning that work for you.

I drive to site visits a lot, so I use the time to reflect and think about ideas to explore when the pace allows. It may be a small thing, but turning off the radio and focusing thought on the work can be useful.

Lesson 4: Try new activities – but choose wisely and keep things simple.

Time is always a challenge. To help overcome it, we institutionalized some set-aside time for learning. For instance, we have a monthly book club-like discussion group session with recommended readings and discussion guides…

Find out much more about these and other ideas for learning when there’s no time to learn in the four-page survey summary from GrantCraft. 

Photo CC Dalo_Pix2

– Susan Stehling, Minnesota Council on Foundations