Labor Manual

 

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How to Get My Job

When I was in college, I used to get really irritated when I or a fellow student asked a visiting professional or journalist how they got where they were in their chosen career—and they answered that we probably couldn’t get where they had gotten following the same path any more. They’d tell their career path story, sure, but that caveat always seemed to cheapen and weaken the career advice in terms of its perceived applicability, and it felt like a cop out. It used to annoy me greatly.

Now that I’ve been working for several decades and I’ve had as many jobs in as many organizations as I have—even having changed careers and industries, for gosh sake—I can tell you this: That caveat is not at all a cop out and usually is not offered as a hedge or a dodge; it is 100 percent true and reasonable.

So when people I coach and mentor ask me how I got started in my industry or career, similar to those professionals who exasperated me in college, I know how I got here… kind of… but I’m not sure you’ll be able to follow the same path. My path will not be your path. My path then would not—most likely could not even—be my path now. I’m actually not really sure how helpful or useful my career path is as a model. Regardless, here are some ideas and lessons for folks just starting their careers that might be applicable for you, too, even now.

Pay Attention to How You Spend Your Time

Shortly into the pandemic and stay-at-home orders, the amount of screen time I was spending concerned me. (My teenage son’s screen time concerned me, too, but that’s another story.) Between my expanded workday without commute time on the laptop, active use of my mobile phone for messaging and social media throughout the day, watching TV and movies with family—and alone, while folding laundry—purely leisure use just to fill and kill time at the end of the day (ahem, TikTok and doom scrolling), and a brand new iPad, my screen time had radically increased… and I wasn’t really even sure to what extent.

So I needed to assess that and audit it—oh, researchers...—so I could be fully aware of how much time I was wasting, if I was, and how much of it I could chalk up to reasonable use in a time of relative stress and concern. Luckily, I had a good start already—and some longitudinal data I could include in the audit.

Since January 2019, I’ve used a mobile app called SaveMyTime to keep track of how I spend my time. I log every action, including going to the restroom (AKA “ablutions”) and feeding the cat (AKA “Spooner”). Here’s how the last two years have broken down, excluding items accounting for less than 3% of my time:

Life Drawing

I've been on a bit of an idea binge tonight, planning much of my media intake for the year in terms of book summary services, newsletters, and the like. And while it's been awhile since I've spent any time with ChangeThis, a 12-page piece by Ralph Perrine has rekindled my interest in the service.

Drawings That Will Change Your Life offers four different hand-drawn models you can use to make decisions, set priorities, and otherwise make your life work better. It's a bit of a pitch for a calendar Perrine's selling -- that contains 12 different drawings -- but there's enough meat here that you can start using his ideas immediately.

My favorite might be the 360 Degree Awareness drawing in which you map what you're aware of -- and make new connections among existing ideas, tools, partners, and projects to come up with something entirely other... something you weren't aware of. A useful exercise that might help you discover a new direction.

People Hour Power

When working on projects, I often calculate how much time a set of tasks will take me personally -- and how long I've worked on something. But I don't always keep in mind the time that will need to be spent by other people involved in the project, either in tandem with me or separately.

At work, we use a conference call service that, after every call, sends you a report indicating what phone numbers dialed in, how much time each participant spent on the call, and the total time spent by participants in the call. After a half-hour conversation this morning, I received such a report.

I spent 36 minutes on the call. Five additional people dialed in, ranging between 23 and 36 minutes per call. The mean time spent was 31 minutes. The median was 35. The mode 36. But another number is even more interesting. The total time spent by those six people (including myself) ended up being 186 minutes. More than three people hours!

What I considered to be a relatively low investment in terms of my time and work energy in fact cost six times the time I spent on it. Were there any people who didn't really need to be on the call? Did I need to be on the call?

BusinessWeek recently turned me on to PayScale.com's Meeting Miser, a tool you can use to determine not just the time cost of a meeting, but the actual salary cost of a meeting. Just plug in the titles of the people participating, and it'll tell you how much the meeting costs by the second and minute. And you can even start and stop it during a meeting to determine how much a work session is taking.

The call this morning, if I have the title mix right, cost a nickel a second, or $3.23 a minute. At a mean time of 31 minutes, it cost just more than $100. Was it worth $100?

A new way to think about how you spend your time at work!