10,000 hours makes you an expert, so says Malcolm Gladwell. Others say otherwise. Regardless of either side there, practice is important. Whether it comes to Tableau, Python – my favorites – or any other data tool/language, practice is important.

It’s important to schedule time for meaningful practice. Something as small as 10-15 minutes per day can often be enough to keep you sharp. There are many challenges online to give you entertaining challenges that make practicing fun. For example, workout-wednesday.com provides advanced challenges for Tableau users and developers to advance their skills.

After over a full year of these challenges, I thought I was really getting somewhere – to the point I started feeling I could solve any challenge. Then a promotion at work, less time, and a few months of not opening the software on my desktop and it was a restart. We’re certainly not talking a full-reversion to square one, but certainly rusty upon restarting. Don’t use Python for a few weeks, and suddenly it’s a google search to figure out something that just flowed from the fingertips.

Don’t let this happen to you. Practice. Schedule time for practice. Stick to that time.

Here are some resources to help you practice:

• Tableau workout-wednesday.com
  • can complete these challenges using PowerBI, D3.js, whatever your visualization tool is
• Python 100 Days of Code
• R R-Exercises
• Datacamp has a regular practice available