What I wish Early Career Staff knew about … career development and work-life balance

Whether you have recently started a new post or moved into a new career, whether you are researcher or consultant in industry or academia, balancing work and life must seem really challenging.

?Having worked in the sector for over 15 years this is what I wish I knew for maximising productivity and progressing in the career ladder whilst making more time available for personal life and family:

1. Plan for the whole week: during the course of the week, at any point in time, you’ll be engaged in one of three types of activities: doing predefined work, doing work as it shows up and defining your work.

Starting the week by not being aware of all that you have to do and want to achieve is much like having a credit card for which you don’t know the balance or the limit; it is a lot easier to be careless with your time. You tend to do mainly work as it shows missing the key priorities for your career and having work bleed into evenings and the weekend.

Planning your week in advance, focusing especially on predefined work and defining your work, would enhance your productivity and reduce stress levels as you will be doing the important things and still have capacity to do with work that shows up (often unexpectedly). So, taking 1-2 hours on Friday or Sunday afternoon to plan is one of the best investments of your time.?

2. Manage your focus not your time: Are you busy or are you productive? Have you ever experienced a moment where you had been really focused on what you were doing (whether at work or a during a hobby or other activity), where time seemed to stop or move very slowly and yet you were making amazing progress on what you were doing?

This has been defined by psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, as the ‘Flow’ – a state of high level of productivity where one places all their conscious attention on one thing at a time. Being in the Flow helps in accomplishing tasks faster and more effortless, saving both time and mental energy. So next time someone asks ‘how are you?’, you can respond ‘I am being productive’. Achieving a state of Flow is a topic on its own and will be a subject of a future blog. However, one key ingredient to achieving this lies in the following piece of advice.

3. Get up and start early: one thing that most successful people have in common is that they are early risers. This gives them the advantage of doing all the important (predefined work) first and while everyone is still asleep. This means no emails or other comms distractions. Just you getting a head start on the day. So that when the official workday starts you have got out of the way the most important for your job and your career development tasks and can handle other tasks as they arrive. An added bonus and my favourite part is that you can finish work early and can enjoy time with family, friends or other extra-curricular activities. Starting the day really early and doing predefined work first has been the most transformational practice for me.

4. Do intermittent digital fasting during the workday: every time you switch from what you are doing to check emails or respond to a message on Teams, Slack or any other communications platform you lose some cognitive focus and power. This so-called ‘digital dementia’ can really hamper your focus and productivity.

Have you heard of intermittent fasting before? Basically, it is a cycle between voluntary fasting and non-fasting over a given period, used to manage one’s weight and prevent some disease. You probably know where I am going with this…

Yes, you guessed right from now on when at work try intermittent digital fasting. Set specific times where you can check emails and engage in digital comms (ideally not first thing when you start work). This will significantly help increase your focus and productivity. Remember the email, telephone and other digital comms are for your convenience, not that of others.

5. Always ask what’s the next action: you just had a great conversation with a client or project partner or a colleague, but nothing has really come out of that. In eight out of ten situations this is because no one in the engagement asked the question: ‘So what’s the next action here?’.

This is the most important and potentially transformational question you can ask during your career. Asking yourself, “What’s the next action?” encourages you to be proactive, seize every opportunity and thus being productive. Herbert Hoover said that “wisdom consists not so much in knowing what to do in the ultimate as in knowing what to do next”. So next time you are in a meeting, you send an email or have a chat with someone ask ‘So what’s the next action here?’.