No matter what your career aspirations are, you should begin by thinking carefully about why you are engaging in any activity and what you expect to get out of it. Here is a process to establish your highest-ranking goals and to determine whether your actual schedule is consistent with this ranking.
- Write down everything you are doing, or are planning to do, in order to achieve your professional goals.
- Organize the items by time horizon: Career Aims, yearly Objectives, and weekly Targets.
- Rank your Objectives by their relative importance, taking into account what the world needs as well as what you want.
- Rank your Targets by their relative importance–both those serving your Objectives and those assigned to you.
- Estimate how you actually spend your time, and compare that with your prioritized set of Objectives and Targets.
- Understand and address the reasons for mismatches between your goals and your time allocations.
Takeaways
1. To be productive, you need to articulate your goals clearly and prioritize them.
2. You should try hard to match how you spend your time to your top priorities.
3. To enhance this match, write down your long-term Career Aims (5+ years), your medium-range Objectives (3-24 months), and your short-term Targets (1 week or less).
4. For each type of goal, develop a clear rank order of priorities.
5. To rank your Objectives, consider both supply (what you are good at and like to do) and demand (what your organization and your boss need from you).
6. To rank your Targets, consider the extent to which they further your high-ranked Objectives, either directly or indirectly.
7. A high-ranked Target can also be a task that your boss consider to be very important, if it is consistent with an organizational Objective.
8. Compare these rankings with how you currently allocate your time. If you find a mismatch, diagnose it. What’s the cause?
9. Some solutions will require changes in your personal habits; many professionals procrastinate or micromanage too much.
10. Other solutions will require changes in your organization’s procedures–or the way you deal with them.
* Source: Extreme Productivity by Robert C. Pozen