Column · half life skill

The half-life of a skill

2026-10-19 · InfoGap

Three decay rates

• Tool skills. Decay in months. The interface, the syntax and the workflow change underneath you.
• Method skills. Decay in years. How to diagnose, structure and verify outlives the tools used to do it.
• Judgment. Decays slowly and can appreciate. Knowing which problem is worth solving is the last thing to become obsolete.

Why this matters for what you invest in

If you spend a decade on tool skills without converting them into method or judgment, you will experience the late-career version of the treadmill: constant retraining with no accumulated advantage.

The conversion

After each project, write down the method, not the tool. What did you check first, what did you stop believing, what would you do differently. That document is the part that survives the next version.

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