Are You Doing One Great Thing Every Day to Move Yourself Forward?
Curt Skene’s In2Win! Career Coaching Supplement.
Time management is about getting at least one important thing done every day, so commit to making this happen. Too often, your day can get cluttered when you lose the discipline of corporate priorities and planning. One can easily get blinded by household distractions or the easy-to-do work that can generate activity, but seldom results.
Like you used to do in the office, qualify your activities and push the envelope to ensure it’s the right stuff for you to be focusing on. Always keep an up-to-date list of pending activities sorted by priority so you can make quick and easy decisions of what to do next. Your commitment to doing at least one great thing every day can really boost your productivity and give you laser focus to ensure you complete your tasks brilliantly.
Make sure you highlight your day’s accomplishments so you celebrate the progress you are making. Continually assess and revisit activities because certain tasks—like networking at the same event or scanning the same job board—will lose value over time. Remember this is your future you’re betting on so you are on the hook to make every day great!
If a planned activity doesn’t deliver results or your lack of discipline lets you down, find forgiveness quickly and then reschedule any missed tasks for the very next day.
Productivity is not about doing more. Identify and complete the action most likely to advance your search.
Why I Wrote This Page
Because too often job seekers do the busy work and avoid the tough work. It’s easier to answer emails or scan job boards for the tenth time than to make the hard phone call or send the vulnerable message asking for help.
Here’s the trap: busy work is measurable and hard work usually isn’t, at least not in the moment. You can point to twenty emails sent and feel productive. You can’t point to anything after one hard phone call that gets rejected, or a networking message that goes unanswered, so your brain avoids it, because busy work gives you a quick sense of progress and the hard thing doesn’t, not right away. But the math is brutal: twenty emails to strangers rarely produce one real conversation. One well-placed hard call, to someone who actually knows the hiring manager, often does.
The way I tell someone is serious about their search isn’t how many hours they logged. It’s whether they can tell me, at the end of the day, the one uncomfortable thing they did that they were tempted to skip.
Action Steps
- Before you open email in the morning, identify the one task today you’re most tempted to avoid. Do that first, before anything else earns your attention.
- Track effort, not just activity. “Sent thirty applications” isn’t a win. “Had one real conversation with someone who could actually help” is.
- If you skip the hard thing today, don’t let it slide. Reschedule it as tomorrow’s very first task, no exceptions.
In2Win! Afterthought
Curt’s current observations and updated guidance will be added here.
Suggested Reading Links
The Learning Library contains hundreds of books on a variety of business and career topics. We want to make sure you don’t miss these ones.
What does this page mean for your search?
Share an idea, ask a question or learn from other In2Win! members. Posting requires a Quickstart, Premium or VIP login.
Be the first to join this discussion
Join the Discussion →