For the past couple of weeks, for most of 2009 in fact, I’ve felt that I am running at periscope depth, meaning I feel that I am able to learn a little bit about a topic, but haven’t had the time to go deep. This is quite the opposite of the training you receive by being in a PhD program, where you are required to go deep and become the expert in a particular topic.

I use the submarine analogy because it best describes what I mean. If you are on the surface and literally skimming topics, then you know very little and can easily be overthrown or thrown out of control by a wave or the wind. By contrast, if you are under the water, you have a little bit more control and are less susceptible to the wind and the waves, but you still lack the depth of knowledge. While I was at Stanford, I felt that I was able to stay at periscope depth, but still be able to make deep dives from time to time. It was a requirement of the role and the task at hand.

In my new role of helping startups, I find I spend a lot of time at periscope depth, but I haven’t been able to make as many deep dives as I would like to into various topics — sometimes topics that would be of benefit to the startups I’m working with and sometimes those for just my own edification.

A big part of the problem has been the glut of information created by social media (mostly useless information, but every so often there are a few gems). Keeping up with my feeds, trying to get a healthy dose of the twitter stream, and most of all managing the beast that is email takes up a large chunk of my week. The weekends have really become catch up days for things left over from the week. Fortunately, the information traffic on weekends decreases just enough to make it possible to write a blog post for instance!

Has the increase in social media activities such as Twitter, Facebook, blogging etc made all of us incapable of making deep dives? Most of the time the web is an “echo chamber,” as it has appropriately been described, for the self-absorbed. Innovation happens not only be being aware of the acitivity around you, but by being able to get a deep understanding of a particular topic. When are entrepreneurs working on building stuff, when most of the time they’re keeping busy just trying to keep up? These are just some of the questions I am pondering over, while I try to correct my own observation of being at periscope depth.

I hope to make some proactive changes to help correct this and carve out some time to still do the deep dives that I believe are essential for being fully informed and not just partially informed.