Great post on Problogger.net that gives some tips on what to do when you get burnt out trying to keep up with the latest Web 2.0 and Social Media flavor of the week.
Feeling Overwhelmed by Social Media and Web 2.0? - Here Are 5 Tips For You
Especially #4. That’s the kicker. At least for me.
As what I call a “web generalist”, I have to try to keep up with just about every new trend in web development, design and marketing. And then decide how, why, when and if it should or could be used. And the decision is getting almost impossible to make.
Jquery or MooTools or Prototype/Scriptaculous or Spry?
PHP/MySQL or Ruby on Rails or Cold Fusion or ASP.net?
Joomla or Drupal or ModX or Custom Built CMS?
Twitter or Tumblr or Pownce?
Facebook or MySpace or whatever new will overtake these?
Of course the only real, true answer for these or any other question like these, is this:
“Depends.”
Depends on what you know, depends on what you need to do, depends on the client, depends on the server, depends on if Mercury is in retrograde, depends on if the shake machine is broken again at McDonald’s.
And therein lies the problem -with so many options now available and potential case scenarios, the decisions we need to make are getting harder and harder to come to, much less have a significant amount of confidence in.
So with all the options, and the lack of clear solutions, how do you know that if you head down one road that at the absolute, least opportune time, you might find yourself at a dead-end and need to turnaround, trudge back to where you began and start all over?
Basically, you don’t.
But, the trick is to not get bogged down in the decision. And the tips in the ProBlogger post are great for those.
Remember #4 - Focus on the Goal, then choose the tool.
Look at #3 and focus your energies on the tools you have. That will probably make the big part of your decision right there. Ruby on Rails looks really interesting, and I see more ASP.net and Cold Fusion jobs out there at better salaries, but I know PHP and have invested several years in it. If I can do what I need to with it, why stress myself out and choke on a project just becuase all the cool kids are using Rails or the guys making 6 figures are using ASP.
Their #5 - “Have Fun” - always encouraged, but sometimes, just not likely. Sometimes ajob or task just won’t be fun, but knowing what you need to do and how you are going to get through it, will make it a lot less miserable. To quote Depeche Mode “just hang on. …Suffer well”. But a word of caution: do not fall into the Tinkerer’s Trap, where you make the foolish decision to take on learning a new tool for a project as a method of learning it. Deadlines are not your friend when learning a new skill set or understanding a new system. I have done this very thing under a project deadline and had my successes (Joomla and ModX) and had collossal failings (Flash + XML + PHP - stil haven’t cracked that 3 yrs later.)
And #1 - “You are not alone”.
Right here with you. I’ll save a seat on the breadtruck for you.
