ExitBuddy

Sometimes you don’t feel like doing anything. When you find yourself  not  in the zone… what do you do? How do you get things done when you don’t feel like doing anything? Not Getting Anything Done The other night I found myself unable to get anything done. I was tired. Energy levels were low. My mind just wanted to shut down for the day. Yet, I had 2 hours of free time on my hands and a todo list a mile long. I was having trouble getting motivated to do anything. “When you least ‘want’ to do something,  is often when you most ‘need’ to take action.” Determined to get something done… (anything really)…  I picked up one small task. I figured if I couldn’t get anything else done, I would do just this one task. Just One Task I forced myself into doing that one task. It was a low effort task . It could be done in a few minutes. It involved scanning a 1-page receipt and emailing it to a colleague. Within a few minut...

You have several incomplete entries in your Google Contacts. Some entries are missing phone numbers, others don’t have any mailing address associated with them while in the case of close friends and family members, you don’t even have a record of their birthdays. How do you get this missing information from contacts and complete your address book? You can always send them an email or make a phone call and fill-in the missing details manually or there’s a new and better alternative – you can ask your contacts to directly update their own records in your Google Contacts. Ask Friends to Update your Google Contacts It works something like this. Your selected contacts are sent a unique URL that points to a web form. They can fill-in the missing data, press the Submit button and all that information is directly added to your Google Contacts. Simple. To get started, go to your Google Contacts and create a new group (let’s call it Personal ). Now put one or more contacts into this new group –...

Ramit Sethi You got the job interview. You prepared by studying the company and thinking about your interview answers. Now what? What separates candidates who get job offers from everyone else? It turns out that interviews are not merely about answering the interviewer's questions. Interviewing is a skill that can be systematically improved. Here are three of the toughest interview questions. You'll see what most people say and how to improve your answers to land a top job. Tell me about your work history What most people say: "Oh, uhh...well, I started working at Acme Corp doing marketing work. Then I worked at A&B as a marketing manager, managing daily emails. Then I went to C&D, which is where I am now, and I've been in charge of PR and marcom."   What you should say : "If you look at my work experience, there are 3 things that stand out. Fir...

When my friend Ben Casnocha sent me a copy of his new book, The Start-Up of You , I knew that I was going to read something innovative about networking.  After all, Ben wrote it with Reid Hoffman, the cofounder and chairman of LinkedIn , and if anything has changed the game of networking in the twenty-first century, it’s LinkedIn. I was not disappointed.  Here, please find 5 networking tips from Ben and Reid that you haven’t heard before.  Start using them today, before you actually need them and before everyone else gets in on the secret.  And don’t cringe, some of these sound fun, even for us introverts . Start Your Own Association Convene influential friends and colleagues with similar interests to share ideas and resources.  Offer thought-leadership and high-level conversation so that it’s more than just a networking group.  Meet on a regular basis, in a convenient location.  This is a great way to keep relationships strong and receive great...

Job seekers often struggle with a termination. Take this example: “I’ve been working in the construction industry. Since the housing bust, business has dramatically declined. Recently, I had a disagreement with a coworker and got fired over this trivial thing I never would have gotten fired for 5 years ago. What do I say about this?” This client is not alone. We’ve all had positions that didn’t go as well as we had hoped. It could have been the company culture, maybe a lack of support made a job difficult, or it could have been something we did. Whatever the reason, it’s a tricky thing to talk about in an interview, especially if your interviewer has insider information about the situation. If you are in leadership, you have to be prepared. Your target company might be getting insider information through their networks. You have to assume they know something about what happened in your last role. The interviewer’s job is to get you to reveal errors in judgment or performance – things ...

Let's face it. We all think about it. At times we think of little else — even if only rarely and in certain settings do we feel free to admit it. The conversation often begins furtively, the question murmured as if slightly shameful or out of place. How can I get more of it at work? Meaning, that is. Meaning at work, in work, from work. Despite work even. Meaningful work. However you put it, we crave meaning more than ever. It may be because we are freer. If we're fed up of soulless work we are told to take charge of our career, find our vision and carve our own path . But what if we can't see clearly? What if a path that looks promising actually leads nowhere? It may be because we are too focused or not focused enough. We feel stuck on a narrow path and we wonder what lies beyond it. Or we hop between jobs without commitment or a clear direction. It may be because we are more exposed. Courses, networking events and social media may not open so m...

What do you regret most about your career? I had just finished a guest lecture on business and innovation at Parsons School for Design , and a particularly attentive front-row audience member kicked off question time with the curliest one of the day. I answered quickly with the hope of getting back on target. But judging from the scores of follow-up questions and the volume of post-lecture emails I received, a talk on career regret would have been the real bull's-eye. Ever since that afternoon, I've been on a mission to categorically answer the awkward but significant question of exactly what we'd do if we could magically rewind our careers. The hope? That by exposing what others are most disappointed about in their professional lives, we're maximizing our chances of minimizing regret in our own. To this end, I sat down with 30 professionals between the ages of 28 and 58, and asked each what they regretted most about their careers to date. The group w...

Job interviews can go bad pretty quickly. Sometimes you're lucky enough to catch an interviewer dozing off in the middle, and other times you might not notice until you walk out the door. Regardless of when a job interview goes bad, here's how to recover. Turn the Tide During the Interview If you're sitting in your interview and start noticing the person interviewing you has fallen asleep then your interview probably isn't going so well. That means it's time to turn the tide and try to save it as much as possible. Here are a few bad circumstances you can save pretty easily. Recover from a Terrible Answer Full size We've all had the facepalm moment in the middle of an interview where we give a terrible answer and catch it too late. Thankfully the Daily Muse provides a pretty simple way to handle it : Take a deep breath, backtrack, and rephrase your answer. You can even say, "actually, can I repeat that, a different way?" The most i...

By Marty Nemko December 17, 2012 RSS Feed Print Marty Nemko Most people stop their job search between now and the new year. They're swamped with holiday hoohah and figure most employers are focusing more on Ho Ho Ho than Hire Hire Hire. But here are six ring-a-ling reasons why you should replace some of your holiday-shopping time with job-search time: 1. Many employers are finalizing their 2013 budgets. Indeed, they may be under pressure to get fully staffed-up for the new year. 2. Many employers, especially in government, have use-it-or-lose-it funds. If they don't spend it by year-end, the money goes back to the general fund and the agency is criticized. (Of course, that's one of the many causes of government waste. Instead of an agency being rewarded for thriftiness, it gets punished.) 3. Most job seekers stop job-searching during the holidays. That means you're facing less co...

On a nondescript evening this fall, I walked into a 50th floor conference room hosting a networking-event-disguised-as-a-cocktail-party for Today's Chicago Woman " 100 Women to Watch List ," of which I happened to be one. And instead of being excited and ready to mingle, I found myself filled with dread. Admittedly, being filled with dread at a networking event is nothing new for most people. But for me it's a veritable occupational hazard. I bill myself as a communication expert — this is my thing. I teach communication skills and I'm known for being able to schmooze and hobnob with the best of them. Yet, when I walked into that so-called "party," it took every ounce of self-control I had to not pull out my iPhone and pretend I had very important business matters to attend to ASAP. As I seriously considered making a run for the door and leaving before speaking with a single soul, I stopped myself. If I couldn't pull it together...

As we approach 2013, it is time again for the LinkedIn team to refresh our popular buzzwords analysis from previous years . Do members still describe themselves as “creative” and “effective” professionals with “extensive experience” or did the most overused words in LinkedIn Profiles change from last year’s analysis? When we ran the analysis in 2011, we had 135 million members around the globe. Now we have more than 187 million. Even though we added more than 50 million new members since we did the last ranking, the data tells us that the number one buzzword globally is “creative” once again. Taking a look at more than 187 million profiles members have worldwide [1], these are the top buzzwords for a selection of countries: Analytical: Switzerland Creative: Australia, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore,     Sweden, U.S. Effective: India Experimental: Brazil Motivated: Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Unite...

A Better Way to Plan Your Career by Robert C. Pozen | 11:00 AM November 29, 2012 My students frequently ask me how I planned out my career to become president of Fidelity Investments. I always tell them, "There was no grand plan; I backed into my career one step at a time." In the years after I graduated from law school, I had no idea that I would ultimately become the president of a financial services giant. I held positions as a law professor, a senior official at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and a partner in a law firm. But during these early steps in my career, I learned a great deal about myself: I found that I really liked doing deals and managing people, rather than drafting regulations and writing articles. So I accepted a job offer at Fidelity Investments in 1987, when it was still relatively young. I spent the next decade climbing the corporate ladder; in 1997, for a complex set of reasons, I was chosen to be president of the compa...

By DENNIS NISHI It was the end of the year and Diana Tigani needed to fill several jobs for three new offices that were opening in South Florida. At any other time, the area director for Regus—a company based in Luxembourg that provides virtual offices for home-based businesses—might have received more than 50 résumés from online job ads. Ms. Tigani had only 12 résumés by mid-November. So she tapped her network for leads and found a strong candidate that she ended up screening over the phone on Thanksgiving eve. "Some people do take time off during the holidays. We're a growing company that's always looking for people. When we need to hire somebody for a new center opening in the first quarter, it's still business as usual for us," says Ms. Tigani, who ended up hiring the candidate two weeks later. Close Dennis Nishi Many job hunters will skip over the holidays when looking for full-time work. But career experts say December is a great t...

Anish Majumdar It's a situation pretty much everyone finds themselves in at some point during their careers: sending your resume out to scores of recruiters and/or hiring agents...and not hearing anything back. Before you consider giving up on your ideal job, here are three powerful tweaks you can execute that will immediately increase the amount of attention your resume receives. Develop a Clear Job Target Specificity is one of the keys to a successful search in today's job market. Instead of going the "one size fits all" route with regards to your resume, research open jobs using sites like Monster and Indeed and start developing a database of positions that interest you. While you should ideally end up with a single job target, it's perfectly fine to conduct a job search across multiple targets. Just be sure to develop a separate resume version for each. I...

We have become a news addicted society. Doubt it? How many times did you read the news so far today? How many more times will you check it before bedtime? When All News is Breaking News If you turn on the TV or check your favorite news website, chances are that there will be a banner that says “BREAKING NEWS.” Like some disaster has just occurred. Unfortunately, (or fortunately?) it is usually just some trivial event or topic that you could care less about. News is meant to inform, educate, and discuss the important topics of the day.  Unfortunately, most news these days is entertainment, sensationalism, and basically a waste of your time. So, how much of your time do you spend reading the news? For most individuals, the news takes up too much of their time each day. We now get it on our TVs, computers, laptops, iPads, and smartphones. It’s everywhere. In a world where you can get the answer to anything with the push of a button, do you real...