If I have seen further

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Isaac Newton, Letter to Robert Hooke, February 5, 1675
English mathematician & physicist (1642 - 1727)

This is how society and knowledge works; we stand on the shoulders of the giants that came before us so that we might see further into the distance.

Creating Knowledge Resources

Over the last 5 or 6 years I’ve put a wide variety of content into the public domain ranging from articles and blog posts through to public web sites and even my own book.  Throughout that period I’ve endured increasing demands on my time to keep up with the growing number of requests which have come from the community for more information. 

While it’s quite gratifying in the beginning to receive the attention, it soon becomes a burden upon your scarce, free time.  And the longer that you maintain your public profile, the more demands you receive.

This is a no different to any classic scaling issue.  Think of it this way - if every 20 articles that you put into the community result in just a single request for your time each month then the growth of demand over time will be non-linear so long as you sustain your efforts.

In order to ensure that you can maintain enough spare capacity to sustain your output and remain productive in the future it is critical to leave behind a knowledge resource sufficient enough to ensure that that future requests don’t exhaust your available time.

The time that it takes to create resources of a higher quality - such as wiki’s and polished articles - may seem inordinately high at the time, but doing so will save you time in the long run.  It makes much more sense to write content once and reuse it than it does to craft custom replies to each and every request that you receive.  In taking the time to craft resources of a higher quality you will not only be buying future time but you will also be creating a lasting resource that is constantly maintained for accuracy and you will thereby be increasing the value of the resource itself.

Finally take the time to tag and cross-link your information too.  This again will save you time from having to fumble through an unkempt knowledge library looking for pages in a random index.

The Road Not Taken

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.