How on earth can you make time for your career progression? Perhaps you start the year, or maybe come back from holiday, full of fantastic intentions to finally focus on making time for your career progression, only for those plans to evaporate within days under a mountain of client work and deadlines?
You know you need to make time for development and strategic thinking, but the day-to-day reality of professional services just seems to get in the way.
Listen to my podcast on How to make time for your career progression. I’ve put the transcription below if you’d prefer to read the advice.
You can also listen to this episode on Substack and on Apple Podcasts
Do you ever feel like this?
Do you ever feel like this? You head into a break, maybe the summer holidays, absolutely full of good intentions. This time you tell yourself, I’m really going to focus on my career when I get back. I’m going to figure out that next step and all the little things that you do consistently that will set you up for success, not short bursts of high performance.
Maybe just maybe you think, I’ll even map out my path to partnership or the next promotion. But then reality hits and you’re back at work, maybe just a week or two in, and suddenly you’re swamped. Maybe it’s a huge deal closing, a major piece of litigation heading to court, the peak of audit season or just that avalanche of client demands and partner requests.
You know, those brilliant career plans, the intentions, gone in a puff of smoke! They seem to vanish under the sheer weight of the day-to-day. And someone recently wrote to me saying exactly that. After a week back at work, my good intentions to progress my career seem to have disappeared.
That feeling of being overwhelmed right after you plan to be focused and make time for the stuff that really matters? It’s incredibly common in professional service firms such as law firms, accountancy and consulting firms. And it often feels as if the universe is having a bit of a joke with you, where the busiest times in your career always coincide with your best intentions for career progression.
For many accountants, lawyers and consultants, this means the real start focusing on their career goal often gets constantly deferred. I’ll do it after this deadline or maybe next month when things quieten down. But when does it really quieten down?
So my very first piece of advice, cut yourself some slack. Seriously, during the absolute peak of a massive project or your firm’s busiest part of its year or cycle, it’s probably unrealistic to expect yourself to carve out huge chunks of time to map out your development plan and then spend a few hours each week starting to implement it.
First and foremost, acknowledge the pressure you’re under. But then, just start. Start small. Okay, while we’re being kind to ourselves, we also need to be honest. If you want to progress, if you’re serious about making partner, you do need to start taking action. The brilliant thing is that starting creates momentum.
Small steps for career progression
Even the smallest step forward sends a positive signal to your brain. And honestly, any action is good enough to begin with. How about trying one of these four actions this week? Could you find your firm’s competency framework or the official or unofficial partnership criteria? Just read it.
Maybe look at the profiles of people one or two levels above you. What are they doing? What’s expected of them? Could you simply book a conversation? Send that email now to book in that chat in a few weeks with your mentor, a partner you respect, or your line manager or counselling manager to specifically discuss your career path.
Or lastly… Just dig out your last appraisal. What did it say? What were the development points? In my experience, too many professionals have grand plans, particularly after a holiday period where they have had time to think. But these plans are often too ambitious for the reality of your demanding schedule.
If you’ve struggled to find time before the latest crunch, why would you suddenly find hours during it? So what do you need to do? So instead, what I suggest is commit to three small things each week. That’s it. Three manageable steps to move your career forward. Now, let’s look at prioritising your development.
Think about your diary right now. Is it round with client meetings, urgent tasks, internal demands, be on this project team? Yeah, I thought so. And while things might be particularly hectic now, let’s be real. In this profession, professional services, there’s always another busy period just around the corner. Always another deadline, another client project, another partner request that feels like top priority and the need to hit your high billable targets.
That means you have to shift your mindset if you want to make consistent space for your own development, which remember is essential if you’re going to move your career forward and then get to partnership.
Your career progression is a brand new client
So here’s a little mind trick, a reframe. Imagine your career progression is a brand new, really important client. This client needs dedicated time in your diary every single week. You need to diarise, schedule specific tasks for this client. Otherwise, this client’s going to get angry, annoyed, and maybe take their business elsewhere. Imagine that.
But it’s the same with your career progression. So with your time being so busy, if you don’t diarise it, if you don’t block out this time, it’s simply not going to happen. Your progression will stay an intention, not a reality. So just pause and reflect. What would happen if you treated your career development with the same importance as your most demanding client?
What would you change right now? So let’s look at a little bit of a trap that we often get into, the “when” trap. So are you telling yourself, I’ll focus on my development when this project is over, or when things calm down in February, or when I get back from a holiday?
You know, this sounds logical, pragmatic even, but honestly, it’s just normally just a delay tactic. Your brain loves the comfort zone of just doing the urgent stuff, the billable work you know. Saying “when” often means never. Don’t wait for the mythical quiet period. Start now, even if it’s tiny. Now on to my next point.
And actually, as I’m recording this, it’s marathon season in the UK. We’ve just had the London Marathon. We’ve just had the Manchester Marathon. And locally, this weekend, it was the Milton Keynes Marathon. And when you think about your career development, it’s a marathon season.
So when you do start digging into a development plan, maybe looking at those criteria for the next level or to move to partnership, you might realise there’s a lot to do. Perhaps you need to get better at business development, improve your leadership skills, build your network, delegate more effectively. It can feel overwhelming. You might get feedback that closing these gaps will take significant time and effort.
This realisation can go two ways. It either motivates you or it paralyses you with overwhelm. So if you feel overwhelmed, remember this. Building a successful career, making partner, progressing upwards in professional services. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Think like a marathon runner. They don’t start by running 26 miles on day one.
Build consistency not grand gestures
They start small, build consistency and gradually increase the distance. Do the same with your career development. But remember to focus on what you can control. Forget those unrealistic ideas about transforming overnight. Just put one foot in front of the other. Do a little bit each week.
Most people wildly overestimate what they can do in a month, but massively underestimate what they can achieve through small, consistent actions over a year or two. So back to that magic number. Commit to three things each week. Remember, they don’t need to be big. Plan them, schedule them, and then every 90 days or so formally review your progress and set your priorities for the next 90 days.
And the penultimate point in this podcast is to learn the power of saying no or not yet. Here’s a crucial skill; learning to say no. You only have so much time and energy. You only have a finite number of yeses you can give out.
While saying yes opens doors, saying yes to everything means you’re implicitly saying no to your priorities. And that priority could be your career development time. You know, in professional services, there’s often a pressure to be a people pleaser, to always say yes to partners and clients.
And yes, the reality is some requests are non-negotiable, but many aren’t, or at least they are negotiable in terms of timing or scope. Here’s how to push back gracefully. Redirect. Can someone else help? Is there a resource they could use? Maybe, for example, have you checked the knowledge portal for that template? Or could Sarah and the junior team help with initial research? The next thing is negotiate.
My advice to help you to say “no”
So explain your constraints realistically. For example, my focus is entirely on the X deal deadline this week. Could we look at your request next Tuesday? Or is there a way to simplify what you need urgently? Maybe offer partial help. Instead of doing the whole task, could you offer guidance or a review? For example,
I don’t have capacity to draft that report right now, but I could spend 30 minutes coaching James on how to approach it. Or send me the draft when it’s ready and I’ll review it. And the final way to push back gracefully is by some time.
For example, you could say, let me check my current commitments and see if I could fit that in. Could I come back to you tomorrow morning? And tomorrow morning, sometimes the request changes or you found a smarter way to handle it. Remember, struggling to delegate effectively holds many people back. Sometimes you need to push back to delegate.
And then finally, use that default diary. OK, I get it. Your diary is packed. So suggesting you block out more time might sound crazy. But learning to manage your time proactively is a skill that becomes more critical as you become more senior. It doesn’t get easier when you make a partner.
A powerful technique is a default diary, sometimes called time blocking. This means scheduling or diarising recurring appointments with yourself or perhaps others for important non-urgent activities. You put them in the diary like any other meeting. For example, block out 90 minutes every Friday afternoon to review the week, plan the next and do one career development task.
Make it non-negotiable. How about diarising or scheduling a two hour block midweek specifically for business development or networking activities such as who you’re going to have coffee with that week. Maybe book a half day meeting with yourself every quarter to review overall progress towards your partnership goals and adjust your plan.
By actively scheduling this time, you ensure the important stuff like working your career, not just in your job, actively happens.
So in summary, making time for your career progression isn’t just about finding huge empty blocks in your already packed diary or schedule. It’s about a mindset shift. Starting small, being consistent, protecting your time fiercely and treating your own development like the critical client it truly is.
Now, if you’re listening to this and thinking, yes, I know I need to do this, but I struggle to actually make it stick, then I want to tell you about something that can really help. It’s about moving from intention to commitment.
If you’re truly committed to progressing your career this year, I highly recommend my course, How to Truly Commit to Moving Your Career Forward. This course is designed specifically to help you overcome the exact hurdles we’ve talked about today. The mindset traps, the procrastination, the difficulty in prioritising your own development amidst all the noise and everything else that you need to do.
It gives you practical tools and strategies to build that consistency and make real progress. You can start working through my How to Truly Commit to Move Your Career Forward course today and can purchase access here. And this course is just one of the14+ courses in my Progress to Partner Academy.
Join my Progress To Partner Academy and access all my courses and use the code PODCAST10 to get 10% off 12 months of premium annual membership.
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