Focus your time

Being unemployed can suck your time away in funny places. A friend of mine was telling me a story about a recent slump he went through. He realized a whole week had gone by where he felt busy all week – but at the end of the week he had accomplished nothing. Not exactly nothing, just nothing that had helped move him closer to his next career.

Here’s what he did:

• Spent time on the phone with banks looking for better interest rates
• Talked to his insurance company about health insurance issues
• Organized the things he wanted to do related to his job search
• Went shopping for groceries several times
• Exercised
• Various other tasks that made him feel busy.

The problem is that while some of these things were necessary, none were actions towards finding a new job. The funny thing to me is that when you have a full time job, everything else gets accomplished outside of your time at work. When you don’t have a job, you find new and interesting ways to fill ALL of your time. I know very few unemployed people who don’t seem busy with something. No one I know is sitting around on the couch watching TV.

But the important thing is to distinguish the things that you would like to get done from those that will help you get a job. It’s so easy to get lost doing the wrong things.

So in the end this really comes back down two things: time management (which can be difficult when you are your own boss) and focusing your time. Let’s look at challenge of focusing your time.

Focus is all about choosing the RIGHT things to do. Given a list of options:

Option 1: Look for better interest rate
Option 2: Email all my contacts and give them an update on my job status and ask for any leads
Option 3: Go grocery shopping

Option 3 is the easy way out. If you are afraid to do something like email your contacts, it’s easy to fall back on something like grocery shopping where there is little risk of anything going wrong other than the store being out of your favorite food.

Option 1 is easier to justify rationally. “I’m not making any money right now, at least I should be getting a little more return on the money I have…” True – but the focus shouldn’t be on preserving your existing money, it should be on how to generate new money. Through working!

Thus the option that will bring you closer to finding work is Option 2 – emailing all of your contacts.

So how do you focus your time? It’s actually pretty easy. Write down everything you want to do today – like the three options above. Then assign three priorities:

1. Helps my job search
2. Doesn’t help my job search but must be done today
3. Doesn’t help my job search and doesn’t not need to be done today

Once you have assigned everything 1-2-3, knock out the 1’s first. Then the 2’s. Then the 3’s if you have time or they can move to tomorrow. When tomorrow comes along, do the same thing. You will notice some 3’s stay there forever and that’s OK. That’s means they weren’t that important.

If you have any other tricks or suggestions for focusing your time, please feel free to share!