I had a talk with Jean-Paul today and one of the things that came up was the importance of doing things with your own slant on them and not just copy what others have done. That talk helped me realize a two traps I've fallen into lately.
1. Blogs.. I am reading way to many of them instead of writing code. Tonight I cut my blogroll down to 4 blogs. I'm actually pretty good at blasting through blog posts to find the ones that interest me but that blasting still takes time. Time I could be spending writing code.
2. Books.. I'm reading a lot of books without actually trying to apply the knowledge. Thanks to what I have read in the book, comments I've read from various people over the last week and seeing Gerard Meszaros give a presentation at the Calgary Tech Fest I'm actually content with where my test writing skills are at. So today I put down my copy of xUnit Test Patterns (wonderful book so far) for a little while.
So if you are like me it's very important that you be able to recognize when it's time to put the blogs and books away and spend some time applying your actual skills And even more important is that while you are coding up this storm you try and apply your own views on the code. While you can just copy what others have done it is much more valuable for you to use it as a base for your own experimentation.
For instance lately I have been reading Jeremy Millers CAB series & looking into the Story Teller code. Doing this has given me some really good ideas on application frameworks.. So now I can sit down and look at creating my own application framework. But when I do this I'm going to put my own spin on it. I'm going to build on the knowledge that I have gained instead of simply copying it.