Spend Time Working on You

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Pressure at work may always keep you hopping but going from task to task even if you capture information about the work is like digging an endless ditch. It is critically important for you to spend time working on yourself. The work you do for yourself benefits your organization and you. Here are a few actions to consider that can help accomplish both work goals and personal goals. These also will help you if you decide you want to change your job or role. This is not a comprehensive list but more of a place to get started. If you want more information or examples, send me a note on LinkedIn.

  1. Build and maintain a LinkedIn profile. Building it is important to start but keeping it up is also important. You should be “socially active” to the extent of brand awareness. You can use LinkedIn to determine how you are branding yourself in your industry. See the Social Selling Index here.
  2. Keep track of learning both inside and out of your organization. Life long learning is up to you. Experience platforms are starting to become very popular inside companies but some companies won’t let you take your data with you if you decide to leave. You can use a platform like Degreed. It is a personal learning experience platform and it is free for personal use.
  3. Maintain a One-Pager of you. I generally keep one updated every 6 months. If an event occurs or something major changes, I also update it.
  4. I enter books I read into Goodreads and this syncs up with Degreed automatically. I try to read at least a book or summary every week. Using the Goodreads application, I can scan the ISBN and it automatically syncs up.
  5. Spend 5-15 minutes a day going over your work and summarizing or updating a notebook of some form. Having this information will help you during discussions around performance. Some companies don’t track performance by mid and end of year but rather reflect through many interactions. Regardless of the frequency, you will always be ready if you take 5 to reflect.
  6. I didn’t mention the heath stuff.. but yeah .. its important.
  7. You can also use services like VisualCV to maintain a master copy of your resume. Resume is not something I actively work on but do review about once a year.

If you want more comprehensive information or some examples, message me on LinkedIn or @howardseth on Twitter.