Finding the Time to Work on Your Career Skills

Finding time for career development activities is a challenge. It always seems like something extra on top of everything else you need to do for work, school, family, your social life, or even the housework. Options abound for learning the missing life and career skills left out of a typical technical education: books, seminars, online classes, blogs, webinars, coaching, mentors, etc. The monetary cost of these training tools is modest, or even zero, but they all require time.

For years, I would get very excited about investing in myself whenever I attended a one-hour career seminar or read a self-help style article. I knew there were things I lacked (e.g. refined networking skills, leadership and management training, etc.), and I had stacks of books to read, but I rarely, if ever, got around to following through on my intentions. Every time my enthusiasm was reawakened, it would quickly succumb to the demands of daily life, and that was before I became the father of two small children. I know I am not alone in experiencing this unproductive cycle of excitement, followed by good intentions, followed by, well, nothing.

I eventually resolved to change the cycle. Through trial and error, I discovered that even with large career and home life demands, I actually do have time to work on my own development and take on extra projects I really want to pursue (like this website). This required admitting to myself that I needed to change my behavior, which is always a challenge, to reclaim a lot of time I was just wasting. There are many different time recovery strategies people recommend. One of my favorites comes from a couple of Navy SEALs who urge you to start your day at 4:30 AM.  Maybe I’ll get into that one when my kids are older and routinely sleep through the night. We’ll see. Until then, I have found a few other strategies and tactics that really pay off for me. Perhaps they will work for you too:

Stop Reading Books: I know that sounds awful, but bear with me. Reading books for education and self-improvement is a truly ancient tradition. The variety of available books is huge, the quality is often high, you can read on your own schedule, and books are cheap, maybe even free. On the other hand, I can only dimly remember the days when I could regularly sit down and read peacefully for significant stretches. I still love to sit down and read when the opportunity presents itself, but my solution to the problem of being unable to read consistently is to stop reading book-length works and start listening to them. Audible is a truly wonderful thing. You can download an enormous selection of audiobooks with only a smartphone and an Amazon account. In fact, the very first audio book I listened to was a production of a print book that sat on my shelf in the “planning to read” pile for a year or more. I find audio books to be a good time saver and boredom reducer. I listen to them in the car, at the gym, and any other time I am doing something that doesn’t require my complete intellectual attention. It is truly amazing how much new information you can assimilate in this fashion. Over the last year or so, I have made it through several college courses worth of material that I would never have had time for in any other format. Besides, what else would I do with that gym and driving time?  Listen to music?  Catch up on the news? There is nothing wrong with those options, but I decided that they were not the best use of my time. That brings me to my next strategy.

Stop Reading, Listening to, and Watching the News: This is a big one that I resisted for a long time. I first ran across this idea in Steven Sample’s The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership, but the idea did not stick immediately. I ran across it again in Tim Ferris’ The 4-Hour Workweek (which, by the way, is one of the many books I have listened to but never “read”), but still resisted. At some point, however, as my free time began to dwindle, I started to ask myself what I was really gaining from the time I took to watch, listen to, and read the news. When I looked deeply at this question I had to admit to myself that I really don’t gain much. I was better informed about what was going on in the wide world, but so what? What part of that knowledge was useful for my day-to-day life? As it turns out, basically nothing. The truly big and important events you hear about anyway, and, while other general news may be interesting, the return on investment of my time is typically slim to none. In the case of the 24 hour news channels, I feel watching actually provides a negative return since the usually non-vital information they provide is delivered in a manner designed to rile up your emotions (which is how they keep you watching) and that is not conducive to keeping focused on the important things in your life and work. At this point, my news intake is limited to skimming the highlights in the front of the Economist for few minutes a week, and a few more minutes reading professional organization news directly related to my work and projects. I have reclaimed hours per week this way that I used to spend meandering through general news content.

Push Yourself and Commit In Advance: I find that after reclaiming time, I need to commit to career skill-building activities in advance to make sure that salvaged time is not lost in some other way. This typically involves pushing past my comfort zone, but if I wait until I “have more time” or “things slow down” it never happens. I recently completed a year-long leadership development course. When I committed to taking it, I knew full well that making it to some of the meetings would be a challenge, but I did it anyway. The prior commitment forced me to get creative and, in the event, I only missed one of the many meetings. So, from that experience and others, I find that Yoda was right. It really is a matter of “Do or do not, there is no try.” The hardest part is having the discipline to follow through, but, as our Navy SEAL friend says in the video above, discipline is one of those things that grows stronger the more you use it.