Don’t Confuse Consistency with Quality
Earlier this summer, I’d decided that it would be a good idea to learn Microsoft Power BI.? This is a tool used to develop dashboards and reports for data visualization.? I have good tools to do this kind of thing already, but this one had advantages of broad support that would make getting data in, and sharing it easier than my alternatives.? With that in mind, I started a bit of self-study.? Because I wanted a concrete objective, I picked studying with the intention of eventually passing the PL-300 exam.
I started off by reading general books, and then thought - there are excellent online courses on the topic.? LinkedIn Learning had some general Power BI courses, but for exam prep, I picked up a Udemy subscription, and found three courses on preparing for the exam.? Each of these courses was between 10 and 30 hours.
My “day job” is split between meetings and data analysis, so the idea of spending huge blocks of time after work watching more screens was profoundly unappealing in the beautiful summer weather.? Before long, I was listening to these lectures (typically at a speed of 1.5X)? in my car on the commute, with earbuds while doing chores, and with my phone next to me before bed.? I felt enormously productive with my multi-tasking - I mowed the lawn and learned about DAX functions!
But after about a month of this, I wasn’t all that sure if I was ready to take the exam.? After another month, I really wasn’t sure.? I started planning out when might be a reasonable time, and it looked like maybe, sometime in fall, would be reasonable.?
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Clearly this was dragging out longer than I’d planned, and I decided to take 2 days, and take studying seriously.? I took practice exam after practice exam, and reviewed every answer with a high degree of focus. A day after I’d started this plan, I scheduled the exam, and wound up passing with a very comfortable margin.
The point of this is that I was replacing the need for real focus with consistency.? The 30 or 40 hours I’d put in of “studying” as listening were not a replacement for the maybe 8 hours of hard focus. They weren’t useless, and I’m sure that this was still a good approach for getting basic vocabulary and concepts, but passing the exam needed that real focus.
If you have a big task to finish, consistency is important, but consistency alone is not quality.
Scientific Delivery Lead, Strategic Partnerships, Target Discovery
1 年Great points, Jon, and congrats on getting it done. This resonates: I'm playing with Japanese in Duolingo and reflecting on the same thing - they've gamified the experience to make consistency easy, but do I really want to commit or is this just a game to play?
Bioinformatician
1 年Interesting! I attended a stats conference back in 2019 and learned from a data visualization workshop that even with R/python skills, sometimes, learning these tools really helps with quick prototyping.
Passionate about bringing people and AI together to improve outcomes for patients
1 年Absolutely love this post, Jon. This not only applies to investing in one self but how work can get done on a day to day basis.
Global Product Manager, OmicSoft at QIAGEN
1 年Great post Jon Hill . In what situations will you use Power BI? I can't imagine you have trouble transforming and loading data for your own data visualizations, using lighter weight tools from the command line. Do you plan to share preconfigured dashboards with colleagues as a walled garden to explore datasets you've already gathered?