Chapter 14: Take Charge of Your Career

CAREER ACTION WORKSHEET

14-1 Planning Your Work 

Most successful people have a written plan. Start your new job with a solid plan. Update
your plan as you learn more on the job. Check off the following planning items as you
put them in place during your first days at work.
Your organization systems: Starting a new job requires new organization systems.
 Get a system. Before your first day, get prepared by selecting some type of planner
to
organize your workweeks: a spiral-bound planner, the planner in your email program
or
some other planner on your computer, or a planner app on your smartphone.
 Determine priorities. Determine your priorities and plan your work around them.
Ask your immediate manager and coworkers what tasks are most vital to the
successful operation of your department. Prioritize your work based on their
answers.
 Form daily habits. At the beginning or end of the day, take 5 or 10 minutes to plan
the day’s work. On paper or online, make a list of the things you need to do that day.
 Diligently record. Record appointments, meetings, assignments, deadlines, and
reminders. Enter important tasks and dates as soon as you learn of them so that you
don’t forget to enter them later. Consider using one color for work obligations and
another color for personal obligations.
 Block off time to work on larger projects and longer-term assignments so that you
don’t end up having to do them all at once and miss deadlines for your ongoing work.
For example, if you are giving a presentation at a meeting on Thursday, block off time to
work on the presentation on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Make larger projects
achievable by listing the smaller steps you need to do. Using to-do lists is a powerful, yet
simple way to help you manage and achieve milestones in a large project. Here are
some helpful approaches to to-do lists:

Manage Large Projects Well

 Put the most important tasks at the top of the list (tasks that need immediate
attention or completion).
 List the tasks as you think of them and then label them A (most important tasks), B
(tasks to do after you complete the A tasks), and C (tasks with no specific deadline).
 Beside each task, write the deadline for completing it and the amount of time you
think it will take. Be realistic about time requirements, especially when you are new
on the job, and ask your immediate manager or a coworker for advice.

Your Career: How to Make It Happen, 9e 92

© 2017 Cengage Learning®. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part, except for use as permitted in a license
distributed with a certain product or service or otherwise on a password-protected website or school-approved learning management system for classroom use.
Chapter 14: Take Charge of Your Career

 Group similar tasks and complete them in one block of time. This focuses your
attention and enhances task performance. For example, schedule one block of time
to prepare documents and another to place phone calls.

Reassess Priorities
As new tasks are assigned, periodically review your priorities with your team or
immediate manager. Here are questions that you can ask to make the conversation go
smoothly:
 Here are our top priorities as I see it for the next week. Do you agree with these?
 Help me understand what has changed that might impact our (or my) priorities.
 If this is our (or my) new set of priorities, can we change the due dates on these
other items? If not, what additional resources can we get to assure we have capacity
to meet the deadlines and the new priorities?

Add your completed work to the “About Jobs” section of your Career Builder Files.

Your Career: How to Make It Happen, 9e 93

© 2017 Cengage Learning®. May not be scanned, copied or duplicated, or posted to a publicly accessible website, in whole or in part, except for use as permitted in a license
distributed with a certain product or service or otherwise on a password-protected website or school-approved learning management system for classroom use.