what most successful people do at work
Most successful people tend to have similar habits.
Laura Vanderkam, author of a new mini e-book, “What the Most Successful People Do at Work.”
Vanderkam, time logs has provided the fodder for her books, and in her latest examination — of how successful people approach work — she’s come up with seven common habits that people who shine use to accomplish things.
While one of these matters above all others, it is also the one that takes the longest to achieve — Here are the seven commonalities:
1. Mind Your Hours.
If you want to give your working hours a makeover, you’ve got to know how long your activities take. To get the same understanding of your own work or productivity, Vanderkam recommends you keep a time log for a full week so you also capture time off.
Whatever you choose to log it, make it something convenient that will also allow you to faithfully track what you’ve been doing.
“Time passes whether or not you make a conscious choice about how to use that time,” Vanderkam says. “And not being conscious of how you spend your time is also a choice."
2. Plan.
The next step to being more conscious with your work time is to plan out your hours - strategize about how best to spend their time, combine activities, do two things at once. Group the things that are the same or in the same area.
She also suggests planning over different time frames. For instance, at the end of the year, you could plan your goals for the year, and then, in your weekly planning sessions, make sure you are steadily working toward those goals.
3. Make Success Possible.
With a new plan, it’s easy to start getting excited about your goals, become over-ambitious … and then fail. But you are more likely to reach your dreams as long as you set discrete, doable tasks for yourself — and then make sure you’re held accountable. First, break down big projects into small steps, and try to limit yourself to tackling three to ten a day.
Then, make sure you get to them. Voice mail to yourself as a reminder or making a promise on Stickk, a web site in which people can set goals and then promise to do something else if they fail.
4. Know What Is Work.
Checking email is not the same thing as doing “work” — Another thing that can look like work but isn’t: meetings. “The reason you have a meeting is that you want something to change in the world by the end of it,” she says. “The problem is that people have meetings to check that everyone is still doing their jobs — but hopefully you hired people good enough where you don’t have to check.”
She also notes that many people schedule meetings as a way of imposing a deadline. She says that if you’re a supervisor giving an assignment, you should explain that you won’t meet about the work, but you still need the project done by a certain time.
In general, she says, “meetings have to earn their place in someone’s life.” For this reason, she recommends shying away from recurring meetings. “Everything you do with an hour should be a conscious decision,” she says.
5. Practice.
Vanderkam points out in her book that while professional musicians or athletes spend time practicing their craft or sport, many people with other jobs don’t. “Yet, if you think about it, your job is likely a performance of sorts, too,” she writes. And that means that you can also consciously practice your job skills with the goal of improving, though you’ll need to ask someone to give you feedback.
“If you don’t get regular feedback, then after you, say, complete a task or give a presentation, ask your supervisor what you can do to improve next time.
6. Pay in.
Let’s say, God forbid, that you lost your job today. In order to find a new one, you’d have to draw on your career capital, which Vanderkam says is “the sum total of your experiences, your knowledge, your skills, your relationships — and all these things enable you to get a new job if you need one, create new situations for yourself or other people, or even let you take a break without having it ruin your career.” Successful people tend to pay in to their career capital account regularly.
There are three main ways to create career capital. One is to simply improve your skills and adopt new ones important in your line of work. Take professional development classes, or have a mentor help you figure out what you’ll need to learn in order to succeed five, ten or 20 years from now. Another type of career capital deposit is developing a portfolio of your work. “The good thing about writing or illustrating books is that they are then out there in the market, speaking for you and your ideas even when you’re not around,” she writes. And that explains why experts in many fields from medicine to business take up the pen. Writing or publishing isn’t the only way to create this portfolio. Doing work that has any kind of visible, tangible outcome will have the same effect.
The third and final way to build your career capital is to build up a network of people loyal to you.
7. Pursue pleasure.
The final commonality Vanderkam found among the successful is that they find joy in their work. While many of our jobs have elements we like less than others, over time, she recommends we try to tweak our time to spend more hours doing the things we love and fewer hours doing the things we don’t.
The other thing she found is that joy, in turn, often comes from feeling a sense of progress in our work. In fact, a feeling of progress brings more joy than encouragement from a boss. For this reason, focusing on the core parts of your work that are measurable and give you the greatest sense of accomplishment will bring you joy, further fueling your desire to work.
So, which of the seven rules does Vanderkam think is most important? Paying into our career capital account, which of course, builds slowly.
“If you take the long-term view of your career, say,
‘I won’t be with any one organization the whole time, but I will be with me. What can I do to make sure that “me” is a great person to work with?’
Laura Vanderkam, author of a new mini e-book, “What the Most Successful People Do at Work.”
Vanderkam, time logs has provided the fodder for her books, and in her latest examination — of how successful people approach work — she’s come up with seven common habits that people who shine use to accomplish things.
While one of these matters above all others, it is also the one that takes the longest to achieve — Here are the seven commonalities:
1. Mind Your Hours.
If you want to give your working hours a makeover, you’ve got to know how long your activities take. To get the same understanding of your own work or productivity, Vanderkam recommends you keep a time log for a full week so you also capture time off.
Whatever you choose to log it, make it something convenient that will also allow you to faithfully track what you’ve been doing.
“Time passes whether or not you make a conscious choice about how to use that time,” Vanderkam says. “And not being conscious of how you spend your time is also a choice."
2. Plan.
The next step to being more conscious with your work time is to plan out your hours - strategize about how best to spend their time, combine activities, do two things at once. Group the things that are the same or in the same area.
She also suggests planning over different time frames. For instance, at the end of the year, you could plan your goals for the year, and then, in your weekly planning sessions, make sure you are steadily working toward those goals.
3. Make Success Possible.
With a new plan, it’s easy to start getting excited about your goals, become over-ambitious … and then fail. But you are more likely to reach your dreams as long as you set discrete, doable tasks for yourself — and then make sure you’re held accountable. First, break down big projects into small steps, and try to limit yourself to tackling three to ten a day.
Then, make sure you get to them. Voice mail to yourself as a reminder or making a promise on Stickk, a web site in which people can set goals and then promise to do something else if they fail.
4. Know What Is Work.
Checking email is not the same thing as doing “work” — Another thing that can look like work but isn’t: meetings. “The reason you have a meeting is that you want something to change in the world by the end of it,” she says. “The problem is that people have meetings to check that everyone is still doing their jobs — but hopefully you hired people good enough where you don’t have to check.”
She also notes that many people schedule meetings as a way of imposing a deadline. She says that if you’re a supervisor giving an assignment, you should explain that you won’t meet about the work, but you still need the project done by a certain time.
In general, she says, “meetings have to earn their place in someone’s life.” For this reason, she recommends shying away from recurring meetings. “Everything you do with an hour should be a conscious decision,” she says.
5. Practice.
Vanderkam points out in her book that while professional musicians or athletes spend time practicing their craft or sport, many people with other jobs don’t. “Yet, if you think about it, your job is likely a performance of sorts, too,” she writes. And that means that you can also consciously practice your job skills with the goal of improving, though you’ll need to ask someone to give you feedback.
“If you don’t get regular feedback, then after you, say, complete a task or give a presentation, ask your supervisor what you can do to improve next time.
6. Pay in.
Let’s say, God forbid, that you lost your job today. In order to find a new one, you’d have to draw on your career capital, which Vanderkam says is “the sum total of your experiences, your knowledge, your skills, your relationships — and all these things enable you to get a new job if you need one, create new situations for yourself or other people, or even let you take a break without having it ruin your career.” Successful people tend to pay in to their career capital account regularly.
There are three main ways to create career capital. One is to simply improve your skills and adopt new ones important in your line of work. Take professional development classes, or have a mentor help you figure out what you’ll need to learn in order to succeed five, ten or 20 years from now. Another type of career capital deposit is developing a portfolio of your work. “The good thing about writing or illustrating books is that they are then out there in the market, speaking for you and your ideas even when you’re not around,” she writes. And that explains why experts in many fields from medicine to business take up the pen. Writing or publishing isn’t the only way to create this portfolio. Doing work that has any kind of visible, tangible outcome will have the same effect.
The third and final way to build your career capital is to build up a network of people loyal to you.
7. Pursue pleasure.
The final commonality Vanderkam found among the successful is that they find joy in their work. While many of our jobs have elements we like less than others, over time, she recommends we try to tweak our time to spend more hours doing the things we love and fewer hours doing the things we don’t.
The other thing she found is that joy, in turn, often comes from feeling a sense of progress in our work. In fact, a feeling of progress brings more joy than encouragement from a boss. For this reason, focusing on the core parts of your work that are measurable and give you the greatest sense of accomplishment will bring you joy, further fueling your desire to work.
So, which of the seven rules does Vanderkam think is most important? Paying into our career capital account, which of course, builds slowly.
“If you take the long-term view of your career, say,
‘I won’t be with any one organization the whole time, but I will be with me. What can I do to make sure that “me” is a great person to work with?’
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\"The Declaration of Independence made us all free. Samuel Colt made us all equal. (the invention of the handgun).\" Slum dog Millionaire
Samuel Colt (1814-1862)
Inventor, industrialist
Restless Youth. Like so many of Americas nineteenth-century inventors, Samuel Colt hailed from New England. He was born to a well-off family in Hartford, Connecticut, and at ten entered his fathers factory. He also went to school until his fourteenth year (a fairly rare occurrence in the 1820s) and would have gone longer if he had not run away from his Amherst, Massachusetts, boarding school.
The young runaway sighned on as a sailor on a ship bound for Calcutta, India, and spent some time wandering the worlds oceans before returning to work again for his father. Dyeing and bleaching textiles did not, however, appeal to Samuels restless soul. Using the meager knowledge of chemistry he learned from the dyeing work, the eighteen-year-old Colt began touring the country as the learned Dr. Coult, lecturer on chemistry. His lectures consisted mainly of getting his listeners giddy on nitrous oxide gas at a time when laughing-gas parties were a current fad.
After three years of this activity Colt decided to use his lecturing profits to invest in an invention that he thought had a future.
The Revolver. On his Calcutta trip Colt had spent his spare time carving a wooden toy gun in which the usual single-shot cartridge chamber was replaced by a six-chamber revolving cylinder. He was not the first to think of the revolver or repeater firearm, but his design outlined most others, and he secured patents for his vision in England (1835) and the United States (1836). In the expansive economic climate of the mid 1830s the twenty-one-year-old was able to secure a three-hundred-thousand-dollar credit line, enough money to organize the Patent Arms Company and begin revolver production at a paterson, New Jersey, factory. At first the young enterpreneur found it difficult to convince the nations largest arms buyer, the U.S. Army, to purchase his guns, in part because of the revolvers tendency to explode several cartridges at once.
In 1837, however, Colts revolving rifles proved useful in the Seminole War, and the Texas Rangers likewise found Colts weapons excellent for Indian fighting. Texas became Colts largest market, but neither Texas sales nor a small federal government order was enough to keep Colts factory in business. He closed its doors in 1842 and went on to other things.
Mexican War. When the United States declared war on Mexico in 1846, Texas Rangers armed with Colts fought alongside the U.S. Army in the first invasion of Mexican territory.
After Gen. Zacharv Tavlor noted the superiority of Colts revolvers, the Quartermaster Corps gave Colt a twenty-eight housand-dollar contract to supply a thousand of the weapons.
Colt had to build a new prototype for the factory to copy because ha had sold his last revolver five years earlier. Since he no longer had a factory of his own, he rented an empty armory near New haven, Connecticut. Colt lost three thousands dollars on the first order, but he was back in business to stay. The Mexican War made Colts weapons standard in the army, and Colt had to increase production rapidly to meet demand. The revolvers reputation in warfare led to increased orders as more and more Americans moved west. Orders increased even more after Colts revolver was displayed at the London Crystal Palace industrial exhibition in 1851.
A Big Business. In 1852 Colt opened a giant factory in his hometown of Hartford, Connecticut, replete with housing, a library, and a public hall for his workers. The three-wing, three-story, thousand-foot-long Colt Armory (which when enlarged in 1862 became the worlds largest private armory) combined arms manufacturing with advanced mass-production techniques as well as a factory that made precision machine tools. Blending the recently invented turret lathe with both old and new cutting machines, Colt had already achieved the tolerances necessary for interchangeable weapons parts by 1851. But it was the production of these specialized machines at the Hartford factory that added a new dimension to Colts profits. he sold both the weapons and the machines needed to make them. Colt supplied his machines to british armories at Enfield and the Russian armory at Tula. Colt also attracted the best mechanics of his age to design tools for his plants, such as Elisha K. Root. Root, considered one of the ablest mechanics New England has ever produced, took over the armory after Colts untimely death in 1862. Root, (and Colt before him) mentored some of the most famous American inventor-mechanics of the nineteenth century.