Feeling stuck in a career rut? Do you feel like you’re spending your days working just on the “day-job” and you don’t have time for anything else? It is pretty common for lawyers, accountants, and consultants in practice to feel overwhelmed with work. However, this leads to not spending the time that you need to develop your career. Many feel stuck in a career rut and they want to know how they can create the time to get out of it. Here’s how to do it.
Create more time with these 4 simple steps
We all fall prey to thinking that we don’t have enough hours in the day to get what we want to get done but the truth is that you do have time; you are just not using the time that you do have wisely. To create more time to work on your career, you need to:
Plan
Nothing gets done without a plan, so write everything down that will help you to start prioritising your career. Perhaps it’s to develop certain skills, to network, to gain more knowledge about your industry or to find a mentor. Whatever your thoughts are, write them down and get them off your mind. This is a brilliant stress reliever and it gets the ball rolling on you beginning to take some action.
Prioritise
Once you have your plan, prioritise your tasks in order of most value to least (e.g. what tasks give you the biggest bang for your buck?). Only when you have done this can you start to make a real dent in working on your career. This is usually one of the biggest reasons for professionals being stuck in a career rut, so start prioritising career development tasks.
Implement
You have your plan and your most important tasks listed right at the top. So, create a schedule and start implementing it into your daily work life. Start by scheduling in 10-20 minutes every day. If you don’t think that you even have the time for this, review your current work. What do you spend the most time on that doesn’t offer much value? Do you do much work that is perhaps below your expertise? Is there any work that you can drop or delegate? Often, being organised is enough to make you realise that you do have time to spare. Nonetheless, if you find that you actually don’t, think of ways that you can start to work smarter.
Measure
Last but not least is to measure your efforts. Has your time building a social media presence resulted in you gaining more connections for your network? Were you offered a project over your peers because you demonstrated specialist knowledge about the industry? Whatever you consider being a success, make sure that you measure it and celebrate your wins. Not only is this great motivation to keep going but it also shows you that you are making great progress with your career development.
Don’t stay stuck in a career rut
You do have time. You just have to be more focused and organised so that you can use it more effectively.
If you feel like you are stuck in a career rut, make sure to plan where you want to be. Stop relying on your firm to notice you for training and development courses. Take charge of your own career development.
Prioritise what areas you need to work on first and commit to taking action. It really is that easy, you just need to hold yourself accountable and monitor your success. I’d suggest getting focussed by taking my Partnership Readiness Assessment – 71 questions that will show you your strong and weaker areas and identify where you need to focus your time. Take a look here – Partnership Readiness Assessment.
Our Progress to Partner Academy members have checklists, guides, short recordings and self-study courses at their fingertips.
They know exactly where they need to focus to get noticed as partner-material each day, week and month of your career.Do you? Find out more about Progress to Partner Academy here
