Not having a job doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a schedule
➔ Think about all work-a-day years you spent on the job dreaming, “If I only didn’t have to get up today…” Well, your dreams have come true. But without a job, it’s not all you imagined it to be, is it?
But even during your job search, each day is a new challenge. While on the job, many employees kept to a regular schedule – one designed to maximize their efforts and their time. There is no reason why your job search days shouldn’t be the same.
The best use of your time
A key component of your new daily grind is planning your activities to best suite the time of day. Of course, given your situation, we can appreciate that many of your days are different with meetings with colleagues and informational interviews as well as actual job interviews. To some degree, you are pretty much at their mercy insofar as scheduling goes.
But for those days when you have no firm appointments, what should your schedule look like?
Mornings are typically best for reaching out to contacts – through email, LinkedIn, submitting online applications, making phone calls, etc. That will allow your contacts the rest of the day to respond to your contact.
With that out of the way, that leaves the afternoons (while you’re waiting for your call backs) for you to do some of the more labor intensive tasks such as researching companies and identifying new contacts. Spend time on LinkedIn to find people who work at your target companies or to re-connect with someone with whom you have spoken in years.
This also is a good time to do additional research through websites, blogs, podcasts, videos, databases, et.al. These kinds of activities can get very time consuming. So much so that this also is a good time to take a break. Read a book. Watch a movie. Go to a movie. Go grocery shopping. Begin to prepare dinner. Whatever moves you.
Just because you don’t have a job doesn’t mean that you don’t, can’t or shouldn’t have a daily routine. Sticking to whatever plan you adopt, will make you more efficient and effective.