Adding to Your Micro-skill Toolbox

What micro-skill have you recently added to your toolbox?

By ‘micro-skill’, I mean a small action that forms part of a larger skill set.

For example, recent I learnt how to filter  emails by size in Gmail.

I learnt that typing ‘size:20mb’ into the gmail search box produces a list of all emails bigger than 20mb.

This is useful because emails follow Pareto’s principle - the 80/20 rule: Most of your email storage is probably occupied by only a few large files. So filtering by size allows you to dig up your biggest emails which you can delete freeing up lots of space.

Now I’m not an IT geek by any standards.

My point here is that part of Learnability is finding our what useful stuff there is to learn.

It’s easy to become reactive instead of proactive when it comes to learning new skills.

They’re not going to come to you. You have to go and get them yourself.  

So rather than browsing social media or news channels, why not spend some of that time exploring sites like Lifehack.org, Howtogeek.com or SethGodin.com to see what micro-skills you can discover? 

If you could add one useful micro-skill per day to your professional (or personal) toolbox, what difference would that make after just a month?

So go on, answer the question: what micro-skill have you recently added to your toolbox?

If you’re struggling to answer, you know what to do.