Jim Intriglia’s Blog

Land that Dream Job: It’s a Matter of Time (Part 1) January 17, 2009

One of the interesting statistics that makes headlines periodically is the high percentage of people that are unhappy with their job. I’ve read some sources that claim upwards of ninety percent of people dislike their job, the people that they work with, or both.

Over the course of my career, I’ve kept company with the ten percent who love what they do to earn a living. In a series of articles, I”d like to share an approach I and many others use to land that “dream job” that you may be seeking. Wouldn’t it be great to join the ten percent of us who love what they do and look forward to going to work each and every morning?

The secret to landing that dream job is to first invest some time in understanding who you are, what your needs are, and what basically makes you happy. There are excellent resources available to assist careerists and job seekers with the task of self-analysis. Many of these tools are free or low cost; I’ll highlight some of these resources in future posts.

The first step, however, is to free-up some of your available time to begin a self-assessment.

You say, however, that you have no free time? The key to solving the time challenge is to learn how you are choosing to spend what time you have available each day of the week. What you find respective of how you invest your time will likely surprise you.

When I returned to school full-time to complete my undergraduate degree, most of my classmates were very busy managing careers, jobs, families and the like. How would we all find the twenty or so hours per week that we would need over the next two years to complete our academic studies?

My first professor challenged that we could all free-up at least 20 hours per week if we considered what was important to us meeting our goals vs. activities that were trivial respective of our life pursuits. To prove his point, our first class assignment was to keep an hourly log of how we spent our time for the next seven days.

At the end of the week we reviewed our time logs. Most of us were amazed to find that we in fact were hardly making the best use of our available time. Many daily activities were outright wasteful, indulging in habits that provided little or no support to changing our life for the better. It was time for a change.

Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.  –Rita Mae Brown

So, rather than spend a Saturday afternoon watching a favorite sports team, the sports fans in our class decided to dedicate that time to study. Some balked, to which my professor asked whether they were choosing to be spectators in life rather than be on the field as managers, coaches and players. Food for thought.

Other classmates decided to begin their workday at 5:30am rather than sleeping-in until 7:30am every morning. The extra awake time gained each week (2 hours per day x 5 days a work week = 10 hours per work week gained) would by itself  contribute half to the total amount of time needed to complete our undergraduate course of study (2o hours per seven day calendar week).

Changing your habits to free-up additional time needed to make changes in your life is the first hurdle that many job-seekers have a tough time clearing.

Those who are truly serious about making significant changes in their life will find the time that they need to take the next step in the process. You can start now by keeping a log of how you spend your time during the course of the next seven days. Give it a shot– what do you have to lose (maybe that job that you hate)?

Challenge yourself to change self-indulging habits that may be satisfying in the short term and also stealing from you valuable time that you can use to make significant changes in your life.

Start an activity time log now and take the first step to joining the ranks of the ten percent that love their jobs and the people that they work with.