It’s been said that time isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.
That is because for many things in life, there is almost always a substitute.
Unfortunately, there is no substitute for time. Once ts been used is all gone.
When you’re job hunting, this is especially true. Because every day spent in the wrong job (or in no job) can seem like an eternity to you and your family. Every day spent unemployed is another days salary that is lost. For every day not making money, it takes two days to make up for that day. I know that you know that, and you now know that I know that.
Job hunting can be depressing. There are a number of reasons for it. Here are a few that are common to many people:
- Its a lot of work with little immediate positive feedback. some of the work you do today will not show any results for weeks or months.
- “No” massively outweighs “Yes”
- Money going out is greater than the money coming in, even for those blessed with a financial package, there is a deadline when the flow will be slowed.
Taking a real action is the first weapon I use to battle depression, unhappiness and melancholy.
Here are four methods actions to help you. These are actions that help to make time a powerful helper. I am sure that you know these actions already. but, lets see if we can present them in way that will give you a new insight or encourage you to get more done every day, so you can find your next job faster …
Plan Every Day
“A lifetime is composed of days, strung together into weeks, months, and years,” wrote Earl Nightingale. “A successful life is nothing more than a lot of successful days put together. As such, every day counts.”
To make every day count we need to plan ahead, to make sure we are doing the right things, at the right time, in the right order.
Yea, yea, we all know this. But we forget sometimes. Or we don’t know how to do it. Here is my approach to it.
If you ask any 10 people to show you their daily to-do list, most professionals will show you one a mile long. Ask somebody to produce their GOAL list, only one or two could produce one. And it’s no coincidence that only about 10-20% of people ever achieve real career success.
So, to join the top 20% in your field, whether you’re employed now or not, the first thing to do is to is create a goal list. Then plan every day around that list. It need take only 10 minutes, but it could easily save you one or two hours a day.
Every morning when the alarm goes off at 5:15, i hit the snooze button. But, I don’t snooze. I stop and thing of the tasks I need to complete that day to get me to my goals. Most other people do it the night before. The most successful people do it the night before. See the tip a little later.
For example, start by writing down the five career-related goals you must achieve. Then write 3 things you must do tomorrow to meet each those goals. Be specific. Don’t write, “Find job leads.” Write, “Find 3 job leads.”
That will give you 15 tasks to do.
Then …
Prioritize The Tasks
Select five of the tasks that you can achieve in one day that need to be done. , rank them in order of importance to your job search. This should take no more than a few minutes.
It doesn’t matter whether you use an Itouch, a sheet of paper. Just make sure you identify clearly and in order the five things you need to do tomorrow, in order of importance.
Tip: It’s a good idea to plan and prioritize your tasks the night before, so you can “sleep on it.” About one hour before bed, take a few minutes to review your plans for tomorrow, then put the list away and do other things. When you wake up the next morning, you may find, as I have many times, that your subconscious mind has worked out the answer to a problem while you were sleeping. Try it tonight.
Work on Top Priorities First
First thing tomorrow morning, take out your to-do list and look at item #1. Start working on it and keep at it until you finish. Then work on #2, and so on, until it’s time to stop for the day.
“Don’t worry if you’ve only finished one or two; the others can wait,” says Earl Nightingale. “If you can’t finish them all by this method, you could not have finished them with any other method. And without some system, you’d probably take 10 times as long to finish them and might not even have them in the order of their importance.”
Sounds simple, doesn’t it? The truth almost always is.
A variation on this approach, only put tasks that take one hour on your list. So if something takes more than one hour, break it into smaller tasks. For example, writing a resume takes several hours. So, one task is to write the job history section, that’s an hour. Another one hour task is the Resume Layout. Another one hour task, is finding who to use as a reference and asking them for a quote for the resume. (That’s part of a guerrilla resume!)
Plan for the Long Haul
It’s not enough to plan the days and weeks that make up your job search. You should also plan for the months and years that make up your career.
Everybody should have a filing cabinet or banker’s box filled with information that accumulates over the course of your working life. “You want to plan not just for this job search, but for the ones that will certainly happen in the future,” says Jason Alba, creator of JibberJobber.com.
While it might be nice to remember the names of everyone in your sixth grade class, it would be really, REALLY nice to remember the names of everyone you networked with, say, two years ago, when you last looked for a job.
Connect with them on LinkedIn.com (and with me) and on Facebook.
Contact management software can help “connect the dots between people you’ve met and things you’ve done,” says Alba, who designed JibberJobber.com to solve the problem of lost opportunities that plagues most job seekers at some point. A great site!
“I tried managing my job search in a single spreadsheet that grew until it became unmanageable, and then I started missing appointments and losing details,” says Alba.
If an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, surely a bottle of planning is worth a keg of time 
To get the most out of the minutes, hours and days that make up your job search, take a few minutes tonight to plan for tomorrow and the days after that. You will then string together enough good days, weeks and months to create a truly successful career.
This is my Monday Morning Job Hunting help. I have taken material provided to me by Kevin Donlin and David Perry, co-creators of the Guerrilla Job Search System.
Kevin and David have been interviewed by CNN, New York Times, Fortune magazine, and the Christian Science Monitor about their method to finding a job.
Get a free audio from Kevin and David on how to get your job search into high gear
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