How to Organize My Day While Job Searching

Let’s face it, job searching is a royal pain. The silence from recruiters and hiring managers is soul-sucking, and the feeling that your resume has fallen into the abyss of nothingness can easily become a nightmare at 2 am. You might even have a moment or two of feeling completely paralyzed…and that’s just between the time your alarm goes off and the moment your feet hit the floor.

Although it is almost impossible to eliminate the angst completely, putting in place a strict Monday-to-Friday job search schedule can at least help reduce the stress and put you more in control of your search.

In order to be proactive instead of waiting for a job to find you, try this Monday to Friday:

• Get up at the same time every morning. Don’t sleep late, or you’ll find yourself getting up later every day.
• Take a shower, brush your hair, use deodorant, clean your teeth, and put on clean go-to-work clothes.
• Establish set work hours and stick to that schedule faithfully.
• Work on your search for at least five hours per day.
• Aim to send out 5 resumes per day…that’ll be 25 in a week and a 100 in a month, which is no small accomplishment!
• Get some regular exercise…even if it’s just a walk around the block.
• Drink plenty of water. You’ll feel better if you’re properly hydrated.
• Do some work around the house. If your old job was such that you weren’t at home to help with children or chores, then it’s important to pitch in now. A lot. Just make sure you still get in those 5 hours of searching per day.
• Spend a little time each week volunteering. It’ll help add perspective to the daily grind.

By sticking to a daily job search routine, you can’t help but make progress.

Just know that there is a job out there for you, and that you are more resilient and more prepared than you realize. The greater the difficulty, the more compelling your success story, so be brave and be bold. You will triumph and it's going to be amazing!

Stories from the trenches...

I was reviewing a sales reps' achievements and this was our conversation:

Me: How is your work success measured?

Candidate: Someone else comes up with our projections; we don't have any input into those. We get paid on our performance based on those projections.

Me: Are those projections realistic, or do they make you wonder what they were smoking?

Candidate: Well...they smoked a good one this year.