Carragee Consulting

If you don’t stretch your boundaries they shrink

Some entry level analytics jobs I had felt very much like groundhog day. I love this visual to get a broader perspective on how you can eventually build a repertoire of skills from the seemingly mundane.

Sometimes the simplicity of the task, data or problem gives you an opportunity to learn to produce the same result across different methodologies, tools or data processes.

Even if you have to eventually publish the same ppt deck, can you build the supporting charts in Matplotlib and replicate the ones you inherited in Excel?

Can you learn to use Case functions instead of nested Ifs?

Can you automate parts of your data pipeline by connection straight to a source and eliminate manual steps to merge/union files?

I have documented (so I could delegate) and/or automated many of my assigned repetitive tasks in my early career so I could free up time to learn new things.

In a way, repetition in analytics is the gift of a “Minimum Reproducible Example” (MRE) — if you can replicate your previous day’s work outputs with slightly varied approaches you can learn a lot overtime.

To quote my friend Al Grahn, “if you don’t stretch your boundaries, they shrink”.

Link to Hannah Wilson’s post