It sounds like nonsense. Yet many unemployed or under-employed people go at their job search only half-heartedly, working 2-3 hours just 2-3 days a week.
How many hours a day are you spending on your job search?
If you’re currently employed, you should carve out 3-5 hours a day to look for your next job.
Not employed? Devote at least 8 hours a day — every day — to this, your new full-time job. Nothing less will do.
If you can’t find the time, think again. After all, finding a job is your most important job now! Like time for your family and health, you have to make time for your job search.
Here are 4 easy ways to make more job-search time in your schedule.
First Job Hunting Time Waster
Don’t watch TV news. It takes 30 minutes to tell you the headlines of the same stories you could get by scanning the newspaper for 10 minutes or listening to the news on radio. Time saved: 20 minutes.
Second Job Hunting Time Waster
Screen your calls. Unless the call is coming from an employer asking for an interview, let your answering machine pick up. Then return all your calls in one batch every 2 or 3 hours. You’ll avoid becoming a slave to the telephone and all the productivity losses that arise when you have to stop what you’re doing every 5 minutes to tell a telemarketer to go to hell. Time saved: 30-60 minutes in useless conversations and productivity drops.
Third Job Hunting Time Waster
Skip one TV show every night. Better yet, kill your television (but that’s another book entirely 
Time saved: 30 minutes.
I actually don’t have cable – I do watch movies occasionally and the few tv shows I do watch (House and Grey’s Anatomy) I watch them on the internet.
Fourth Job Hunting Time Waster
Get up 30 minutes earlier and go to bed 30 minutes later Monday to Friday. You can miss a little bit of sleep each weekday until you find your dream job. Sleep in and don’t use an alarm clock on weekends. Time saved: 60 minutes.
(You might actually live longer on one hour less of sleep each night. No kidding!
Sleep – Get What You Need and Live More and Longer
Although its a common belief that 8 hours of sleep is required for optimal health, a six-year study of more than one million adults ages 30 to 102 has shown that people who get only 6 to 7 hours a night have a lower death rate.
Individuals who sleep 8 hours or more, or less than 4 hours a night, were shown to have a significantly increased death rate compared to those who averaged 6 to 7 hours. Researchers from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine and the American Cancer Society collaborated on the study, which appeared in the February 15, 2002 issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, a journal of the American Medical Association.)
I only sleep 6 hours a night at most. My alarm goes off at 5:10 every morning. (Actually I have multiple alarms in the mornings – to keep me on schedule. It hasn’t been changed in 20 years. The alarms don’t change on Saturdays and Sundays. I just use the later alarms.
Yes and sometimes I do sleep in – usually when I go to bed later than 11:00.
Here is another way to think about it – if you sleep 2 hours less a day.
2 Hours a day x 7 days a week = 14 hours.
14 Hours a week x 52 weeks a year = 728 hours or 30 Days.
Sleeping 2 hours less a night gets you a whole extra month each year.
If your live fourscore and 10 – seventy years and start this at 50. You get an extra 20 months – or two years.
Start it at 40 and you get 30 months. Almost an extra 3 years of living.
Its something to think about.
Action Step: Use the time that others waste. A full week of productive 8-hour days devoted solely to your job search can dramatically reduce your time out of work. Between the hours of 8:00 and 4:00 (or whenever you are most productive) don’t shop for groceries, watch TV, rake the yard or do anything else but one thing: look for your next job.
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This job hunting post was adapted from content provided to by my good friends 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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