Basically the title, you need to use the skills you have now and be a productive member of society.
I don’t mean go back and show the wheel or try invent germ theory etc.
For example I’m a mechanic i think I could go back to the late 1800s and still fix and repair engines and steam engines.
Maybe even take that knowledge further back and work on the first industrial machines in the late 1700s but that’s about it.
If you placed me at the beginning of the industrial revolution I could from available materials build a working telegraph and telephone system and do pretty well for myself.
Prior to that I could be a pretty good peasant.
If the people at the time allowed you and gave you the means to, I think most people could definitively revolutionize one or two fields, and accelerate multiple more
Even just knowing what is possible in the future should not be underestimated. I could point people towards the right track in physics, chemistry, astronomy, material science, biology, medicine, electronics, and so on. But especially in computer science and communications/networking, as those are the fields I know the most of. I could probably be a major founder of the field and (re)discover a lot of parts of it
A lot of science is essentially stumbling around in the dark. Yes, we’re doing it methodically and sometimes we get some pointers towards the right track, but we can’t know what we don’t know. If we knew exactly what it is that we should/could know but don’t, that is a massive benefit. Like for example, at some point in time people didn’t know if antibiotics or vaccines were possible, but if you told them “yeah, I don’t know the specifics, but I absolutely know 100% for sure that it’s possible” you can be sure it would spur a massive investigation into it, and you could give pointers from the bits and pieces you knew
Of course, as mentioned, the big issue is them trusting you and actually believing you have some sort of knowledge they don’t have. If you don’t play your cards right you’ll probably just get killed for being a charlatan lol. But if you manage to get some early wins and score yourself a dedicated workshop/lab and a team, you could do soon much
We seem to all be good peasants now unfortunately haha
Hey now some of us would make terrible peasants.