Let’s Get Organized!

Where do I even start?!

At the beginning – where we always start.

If you think about job hunting, networking, identifying companies, making a list of non-negotiables, writing your resume, crafting cover letters – you’ll drown. Or worse, you’ll give up. Instead, let’s tackle this one piece at a time.

Let’s start with something that you can do right now that will be a tangible step toward progress in your job search.

Let’s build a calendar.

If you’re anything like me, I like to see what I’ve accomplished during a day, a week, a month, or a year. Calendars and checklists are my go-to method for keeping track of goals as well as planning for them.

Click the link to the left to snag a copy of my free weekly calendar template or create a prettier version of your own using Canva or a similar design tool. My only word of caution is this: remember, this calendar should be something that you can edit easily and keep notes on so if modifying it becomes a pain, it’s already lost part of its value. Don’t make it complicated just so that it looks good on the front of a planning binder (I’m speaking from experience here).

Let's Build Your Calendar

Step 1 – Download My Calendar (or create a calendar of your own)

Feel free to use whatever calendar or organizational method works best for you – just make sure that whatever you’re using incorporates a daily focus, associated tasks, and a daily limit.

Step 2 – Evaluate Your Available Time During the Week

Think about what kind of time you have available by day.

Will you be using any time on the weekend?
What nights are you on the hook for making dinner?
If you have kids, which nights are you taking them to practice or ballet or piano?
Can you spend some of the time that you’re waiting to pick up your other half from work doing some networking?

These are just some of the questions that you might ask yourself. But be reasonable – don’t be trying to apply for a job as you’re picking up dinner.

Step 3 – Think about Your Cognitive Load by Day

Now, beyond just the time you have available, think about what your day looks like in terms of your cognitive demand and load.

For example, my Mondays typically end earlier than some of my other days but I am in nearly back to back meetings that require preparation for and presenting during those meetings and by the end of that day I am mentally depleted. So I wouldn’t select a focus activity like applying for jobs or up-skilling that requires significant cognitive load for Monday evenings. I might select something like networking that is a pretty low-lift but interesting and high-return activity.

Step 4 – Determine Your Time and Energy

You’ve figured out what kind of time and how much mental energy you have available each day. You’ll use that information in the next section to select your focus and tasks and to determine your limits.

We’re halfway there. Good work.

The Big Three: Focus, Tasks, and Limits

Focus

Think of your focus like your theme that all of your daily tasks will fall within. Depending on the career(s) that you’re looking at, the people you’re looking to network with, or your approach to job hunting, your focuses may look a little different then the ones that I’ve outlined on my sample calendar. Some examples of focuses might include:

creating and/or refining your non-negotiables
up-skilling (and updating your resume)
networking with recruiters, hiring managers, or other individuals within a role, industry, or company
working on your portfolio website/display method
researching companies and roles
applying for positions
completing content/material projects for interviews
developing materials and documents for your portfolio
drafting cover letters
refining your LinkedIn (or other social media) profile, portfolio, or website

This list is just a sample of what you might have. Don’t be afraid to carve out time for something, even if it doesn’t feel critical. Your time will eventually bear that out – if you’re consistently spending less the time you’ve allotted for that focus activity or running out of things to for that focus activity, then it may not be as critical as you originally thought and can be rotated out to every other week or even less often. Don’t be afraid to add and remove focuses as you need to – after all, it’s your schedule

Tasks

Tasks, as you might have guessed, are the actions you take based on the focus you’ve selected for the day.

For example, if your focus for the day is about Up-Skilling specifically in the arena of Project Management, you might have tasks that look like:

identify 3 – 5 PM LinkedIn Learning/Coursera/Udemy Courses with Certificates
complete PM Basics Course that I started last week
do some research on Google’s PM course and whether or not my top 3 companies see that as a useful course/resume component

Keeping track of these tasks does 2 things for you – it helps you remember things that you intend to do but don’t intend to do as soon as you think of them (like while you’re in the middle of showering or at 3 in the morning, which is when my ideas strike me), and it helps you look back and see what you’ve accomplished during the day.

I realized at a very young age that if I don’t see progress, I don’t feel progress. I’ve learned that’s true for more than just me.

Limits

Now, let’s talk limits. These are actually the most important thing to put on your calendar and should set the stage for all the focuses and tasks that you choose. Think back to the section before this, where we talked about your cognitive load for the day and the amount of time you have available to spend on your job hunt.

First – just because you have 4 hours at the end of the day that you can dedicate to finding your next position, doesn’t mean you should use all of those 4 hours, especially if, like my Mondays, that particular day is a high cognitive load day. You want to make sure that you’re fresh for the tasks that you’re performing. Set reasonable limits. Once you start feeling fatigued, you should be ready to hang it up for the night, or, at the very least, take a break.

Second – you don’t have to limit yourself to time-related limits. On my calendar, you can see that I’ve set application limits. Some others to consider might be:

number of connection requests sent
number of hiring managers messaged
number of courses queued
number of lessons within a course taken/passed

Again – these limits are there to help you establish a healthy boundary and give you a sense of accomplishment. It’s to keep you from saying to yourself, “I’ll just do 5 more minutes.” or “I’ll just find 2 more people.” which we all know never goes the way we plan.

Q&A

But what if I need to spread out my tasks over more than one week?

Do it. Whatever works for your schedule and keeps you sane.

Here are some things to think about:

If you’re having to spread out to more than 1 or 2 weeks, you might experience slower progress in you search – that’s fine if you’re ok with that (a.k.a. you’re employed, not so at your wit’s end that you’re experiencing stress related physical illness, etc.).

Having to spread your tasks out over more than a couple of weeks could also mean that you may have too many tasks. If you’re trying to apply to a half a dozen job types – that’s a lot. The current prevailing thought is that you should focus on no more than 3 job types at a time (i.e. Customer Success in EdTech, Training and Implementation in FinTech, etc.). My recommendation would be to only start with 1, especially while you’re figuring out your non-negotiables.

I don't know that I'm ready to handle the variety of tasks you have laid out in your template calendar, Claire. What do I do?

No stress. This series of LinkedIn Posts and Blogs will help you flesh out these different tasks. For now, focus on the tasks that you do know how to do and feel comfortable with.

If that means, only feel comfortable finding jobs that you feel you’re a good fit for, great. If that means that you only feel comfortable networking at this stage, also great. Do that for now. You have to start somewhere and, in my opinion, it’s better to start somewhere that you’re comfortable and won’t be likely to panic or give up.

What happens if I end up with a day where I'm already finished with my task or there is no task to be done?

That’s totally fine! You have options.

Option 1 – be done for the day. If you’ve had a particularly full week, give yourself the opportunity to take a break. Future you will appreciate that decision.

Option 2 – catch up on any other task that you didn’t get finished during your allotted time/limit from another day. For example, if you planned on applying for 10 jobs on Monday but only got through 8 during the 3 hours you had scheduled, pick up those extra two. Or if you had planned on reaching out to 6 people at a particular company last week but could only find 5 during the time you had available, go back and find 1 more.

What happens if I find myself consistently not finishing the same task every week?

Then you might need to break that task up into two different tasks or spread it across more than one day – which, by the way, both are fine options.

Is it ok to do the same task more than once during a week?

Absolutely. In fact, if you’re starting with a single job focus in mind, you probably will have repeating tasks during the week. That’s completely fine.

I'm not really a calendar kid - can I use a different method and still be successful?

Listen – whatever works for you works for you. The most important thing is to find an organizational method and stick with it.

Speaking from experience (lots of experience), if you don’t pick a method that works for your planning and organizational style, you are much less likely to stick with a plan and follow through.

Can I have more than one focus during a day?

Sure, but here are my only two caveats.

1. Take a break in between switching focuses even if it’s something as simple as going to get a drink, walking up and down your stairs once, or getting the mail. You need that mental break to feel re-energized and ultimately that second focus item deserves the same amount of energy that the first did. Don’t short change it.

2. Don’t overload yourself. It’s incredibly tempting to want to squeeze a second focus into a period of time when you think you can but (to steal Bill Nye’s catch phrase) consider the following – there is an inherent time-loss