To keep things interesting in between my legal updates, Justin Nassiri has contributed again with this guest post.  This time, Justin discusses ways to gain expertise during time you might usually waste.  Enjoy!

3 Ways to Develop a Relative Expertise Using Only Dead Time

I went to school with some of the brightest people I’ve ever met, with exceptionally deep and diverse backgrounds. However, I’m continuously surprised at how quickly, even amidst such impressive company, one can develop a relative expertise that can be useful to others.

For any of you that have worked with a startup, you know how many various tasks you’ll do in a given day. You also know how helpful a network of knowledgeable fellow entrepreneurs can be to save you both time and money on everything from SEO to low cost distribution.

I’ve found that it takes only a slight emphasis on any one area to start developing a relative expertise – far from an expansive knowledge, but still of great benefit to those with no knowledge about a subject. I’ve relied on many friends, classmates, and former coworkers who had relative expertise in all sorts of areas – best ways to reach out to bloggers, how to draft a press release, how to get free wifi from Starbucks – and their pockets of knowledge have been invaluable to me.

I’ve found three practices to be extremely helpful in building up an array of practical knowledge that can help out others who have yet to grapple with a certain problem. So, here are three quick tips that can help you start to build and record an area of relative expertise with virtually no time except dead time.

(1)    Setup a Podcast download: services like PodBean will collect and download your favorite Podcasts for you. I prefer The WallStreet Journal This Morning, NPR: Shuffle Podcast, The Economist, and GSB’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders. Download these to your mp3 player in the morning – you’d be surprised how much content you can get through during traditional dead time – waiting in line, walking through parking lots, etc.

(2)    Keep track of your research – whenever you’re doing cost comparison (which goes along with just about everything with startups), take the extra second to keep track of the points of differentiation for the options you consider. I find spreadsheets are the best for this, and have been asked for my recommendations on server space, business card manufacturers, and other cost saving analysis spreadsheets more times than I can remember. (Not to mention the hundreds of similar spreadsheets friends have shared with me in the last two years).

(3)    Setup a RSS Reader: I use Google, but there are plenty of great programs out there. Take 10 minutes to find 3-5 blogs on topics that interest you, and subscribe to their RSS. It’s like having all of your industry reports delivered to your front door every morning, and you can skim through when there’s downtime during the day.

I know I wouldn’t be where I’m out without the help and advice of others, so it feels good to be able to give back to others that have not yet delved deeply into a particular area of an industry or entrepreneurship.