Do you have a clear career vision and mission? If not, you might find it hard to prioritize your daily tasks and align them with your long-term goals. In this article, you will learn how to create a career vision and mission statement, and how to use them as a guide to prioritize your daily tasks.
Creating a career vision and mission statement involves reflecting on your core strengths, passions, values, goals, and objectives. Ask yourself questions such as what you want to solve or address and how you want to make a difference. Then, write down your answers and try to summarize them in one or two sentences. For instance, your career vision could be "To become a leading expert and innovator in the field of personal development and help millions of people achieve their full potential" while your mission statement could be "To provide high-quality and engaging content, coaching, and training on personal development topics and skills." Crafting these statements is an important step for determining the direction of your professional life.
To effectively prioritize daily tasks based on your career vision, set clear goals, align tasks with your long-term objectives, prioritize high-impact activities, allocate focused time, manage distractions, and regularly track your progress. This approach ensures that your daily efforts contribute directly to your professional aspirations.
In my experience, we can be terrible at predicting the career paths that will leave us feeling satisfied and fulfilled. Instead, spend some time reflecting and writing down the moments in your career when you felt most proud. What were you doing? How did it make you feel? A good litmus test, write down the last time you left work eager to tell a friend or loved one about your day. What was it about that experience that filled you with pride? Start there, worry about the vision later.
Once you have your career vision and mission statement, you can use them as a filter to prioritize your daily tasks. There are various methods and tools available for this purpose, such as the Eisenhower matrix which divides tasks into four categories based on their urgency and importance, the ABCDE method which assigns a letter to each task based on its importance, and the MoSCoW method which categorizes tasks into four groups based on their necessity. When using these methods, you should focus on those tasks that are both urgent and important first, then decide on the important but not urgent tasks, delegate the urgent but not important tasks, and delete the tasks that are neither urgent nor important. Additionally, you can add numbers to each letter of the ABCDE method to further rank the tasks within each category. By following these methods, you can effectively prioritize your tasks and make sure that you complete the most necessary ones first.
I find writing down the #1 area you can make an impact. If the task in front of you doesn't directly contribute to that focus area, it doesn't deserve your time and attention.
We are often bombarded with 100’s of emails daily. To make things worse, we are called in for meetings that sometimes doesn’t really need our input. This is inevitably suck up our day and leave you working into the night and weekends just to keep up with priorities missed during the week. Consider 2 things, IMPACT & IMPORTANCE. Then DECIDE, DO IT NOW/DO IT LATER (schedule it)/ DELEGATE IT/DUMP IT. Do this every single day! One more thing… Don’t just say yes to all meetings! Decide if you’ll bring value to the meeting or if you have information to gain from the meeting, before deciding to attend. Learn to say no! Make it part of your habit to place priority to prioritizing!
Prioritizing your tasks should always involve checking if they align with your career vision and mission. Ask yourself these questions to determine if a task is worth your time and energy: does it help you achieve your vision, fulfill your mission, match your values and passions, leverage your strengths and skills, and challenge you to grow? If most or all of the answers are yes, then it is likely to be a high priority. Conversely, if most or all of the answers are no, then it is likely to be a low priority and potentially a distraction or drain of resources.
Optimizing and automating your daily tasks is another way to prioritize them based on your career vision and mission. This can help you improve your efficiency, effectiveness, and quality of work, while reducing or eliminating repetitive, tedious, or low-value tasks. Examples of optimization and automation include using templates, checklists, and workflows to standardize and streamline processes and outputs; using software, apps, and tools to automate, simplify, or enhance tasks; outsourcing, delegating, or hiring someone for tasks that are not within your core competencies; and batch processing similar or related tasks together.
Context switching can be a time sink. Here's a few ideas to use your time effectively: -Calendar blocks for focused activities -Turn off all phone notifications -Set the stage to do your best work (for me, some classical music, water and usually more caffeinated beverages than I care to admit)
The final step to prioritize your daily tasks based on your career vision and mission is to evaluate and get feedback on your performance and results. This will help you measure your progress, identify strengths and weaknesses, and adjust strategies and actions accordingly. To do this, you can set SMART goals for each task and track outcomes and achievements. Additionally, ask for feedback from clients, customers, colleagues, managers, mentors, coaches, or peers on your work quality, value, and impact. Self-assessments and reflections on your work process, skills, and learning are also beneficial. Finally, celebrate wins and successes while learning from failures and mistakes. By following these steps, you can ensure you're spending time on the things that matter most to your career.