Are You Monetizing Every Moment?
Curt Skene’s In2Win! Career Coaching Supplement.
This question is about creating a mindset that inspires you to get more value out of everything you do. It’s about constantly asking how you can leverage the people you meet, the activities you do and the investments you make. It’s about becoming obsessed with the notion that every activity needs to payback twofold. Start planning your day so that you give yourself plenty of “face time” with people and use off hours for administration. If you are writing a blog, ask who needs to be reading it and reach out to that target audience.
Also, if you have a message to share, who needs to be hearing it? Then ask yourself how you can ensure that they do? When you attend meetings or networking sessions are you getting the type of connections and introductions that you need? If not, what can you do differently the next time? While monetizing your time may sound selfish, it’s not.
It’s simply about being smart and efficient in your job search. Learn to standardize as much as you can and consider outsourcing tasks to others who can do it better and faster than you. Finally, remember monetizing is all about balance. Find that perfect mix of activity so that you can achieve maximum return without over saturation. Every activity has a payback point after which you will see diminishing returns.
You absolutely can overdo things (e.g. networking, social media, job board searches) especially if you start sacrificing other important activities to do so.
Money and opportunities can return; time cannot. Spend each day on activity that genuinely advances your search.
Why I Wrote This Page
Because every hour spent on a low-value activity isn’t just neutral, it’s actively displacing a higher-value use of that same hour. The real cost of busywork isn’t the busywork itself, it’s whatever you didn’t do instead.
This is opportunity cost applied to attention, not just time. An hour spent refreshing job boards feels harmless because it feels like effort. But it’s an hour not spent on the phone call, the meeting, or the follow-up that actually moves your search forward. The hour is gone either way. The only question is what it bought you.
This isn’t about squeezing more hours into your day. It’s about being honest about what each hour is actually buying you.
Action Steps
- At the end of each day, rank your activities by what they actually produced, not by how busy they felt.
- Before starting a low-effort task, ask what higher-value activity it’s quietly displacing.
- Batch your genuinely low-value admin into a single fixed window so it stops eating time that belongs to higher-value work.
In2Win! Afterthought
Curt’s current observations and updated guidance will be added here.
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