But surely it depends so much on the type of question, and who you're asking, and why!
I definitely agree that working things out can lead to greater knowledge. But when the questions are things like "Where is the documentation for X? I have already looked in the following sensible places...", half an hour of fruitless searching through outdated documents on the company X: drive isn't going to teach you anything except that the documentation isn't well-publicised/well-linked/well-presented.
I find it's generally a question of working out what I need to know and how I can best find it out, and -- if some stages of that finding-out involve asking questions of other people -- making it clear to the people I'm asking that I have already checked the obvious places and done the background learning required to make their answer useful. Targeted questions, that the people in the know can answer quickly and painlessly. And if the person answering the question can tell me how to find out the answer, in a way that I can learn from or generalise from, then so much the better.
Also, if you're getting your time wasted by "people asking endless streams of trivial questions", then I'd venture to suggest that you need to manage your time (or your conceptual in-tray) better. Ach, you know all this stuff: don't drop everything to reply to each email that comes in, have templated replies for dealing with the FAQs, switch the phone through to voicemail if you need to carve out some time when you won't be interrupted, etc., etc.
And if enough people are asking me the same 'obvious' questions over and over, then I find it's worth considering (not agonising over, just re-examining the question) whether either a) the answer isn't as obvious as I think it is, or b) it isn't clear who people should be asking or where they should be looking; and maybe I need to think about ways of pushing that knowledge out more proactively to the people who need it. If the one person who knows the answer can communicate it to all the people who need to know it, then less time overall is wasted than if either that person answers the same question n times, or if n people work it out the hard way for themselves.
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Date: 2006-06-23 10:21 am (UTC)I definitely agree that working things out can lead to greater knowledge. But when the questions are things like "Where is the documentation for X? I have already looked in the following sensible places...", half an hour of fruitless searching through outdated documents on the company X: drive isn't going to teach you anything except that the documentation isn't well-publicised/well-linked/well-presented.
I find it's generally a question of working out what I need to know and how I can best find it out, and -- if some stages of that finding-out involve asking questions of other people -- making it clear to the people I'm asking that I have already checked the obvious places and done the background learning required to make their answer useful. Targeted questions, that the people in the know can answer quickly and painlessly. And if the person answering the question can tell me how to find out the answer, in a way that I can learn from or generalise from, then so much the better.
Also, if you're getting your time wasted by "people asking endless streams of trivial questions", then I'd venture to suggest that you need to manage your time (or your conceptual in-tray) better. Ach, you know all this stuff: don't drop everything to reply to each email that comes in, have templated replies for dealing with the FAQs, switch the phone through to voicemail if you need to carve out some time when you won't be interrupted, etc., etc.
And if enough people are asking me the same 'obvious' questions over and over, then I find it's worth considering (not agonising over, just re-examining the question) whether either a) the answer isn't as obvious as I think it is, or b) it isn't clear who people should be asking or where they should be looking; and maybe I need to think about ways of pushing that knowledge out more proactively to the people who need it. If the one person who knows the answer can communicate it to all the people who need to know it, then less time overall is wasted than if either that person answers the same question n times, or if n people work it out the hard way for themselves.