Looking for a job? Get a routine and stick to it.

Getting a job is not a nine-to-five job. It’s a sixteen-an-hour-a-day proposition, from the moment you get up until the moment you go to sleep. With that kind of workload, you need a daily schedule to manage that routine and organize your time. No employer is around to police your time management, and that means the control burden falls squarely on your own shoulders. This doesn’t mean you’re being sentenced to endless rounds of self-punishment and drudgery. If you’re going to be at your best, you’ve got to have some fun too, so make room for a little downtime.

Start the week unofficially on Sunday night. You’ll want to scribble out a short list of things to get done the next week and check it against the list you had the previous week.

Set goals. To put them to work for you they must be:

Measurable

Identifiable

Documented

Attainable

Specific

And they need to be examined regularly.

Note the first letter of each word spells Midas, and I call this approach giving goals The Midas touch because it turns goals into gold.

How many new contacts did I make this last week? Did I stretch our geographically into new areas? Explore new job descriptions? Improve my presentation or appearance? Grade yourself, and don’t be too narrowly focused. A week without getting a job is not a week of failure. You may have accomplished other goals last week, things you’ve never had the time for or put in the effort to achieve in the past.

Think of what you are doing as a new do-it-yourself skill, like crafting a fine piece of woodworking or raising and grooming a bonsai plant. Why? Because you are going to need to use the same job-finding skill set twelve to fifteen times in your working life. You can and will become an expert at it. So good and efficient, in fact, that you will be able to methodically get a new job in your off-hours while you actually have one during the work day.

For my straight forward advice for college graduates click here for my 11 minute audio podcast. 

Mackay’s Moral: It bears repeating: Getting a job is a job.