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Twelve Simple Tactics to Shore Up Your Career During Work Downtime
When I used to work in an office environment, my days consisted of working on little projects and tasks that would fill half an hour or an hour or so, then I’d have a bit of downtime. I would either be doing some internal thinking about the next thing I needed to work on or I might be waiting on someone or something.
The same thing is true now that I’m a self-employed writer. I’ll work on an article until it’s finished or I’ll edit an article and submit it and then I’ll find myself with a little pit of downtime while I’m thinking about what to do next.
I’ve found that, both then and now, using that “downtime” in a smart fashion is vitally important in terms of building a successful career. Why? Two reasons.
The Employment Guide
Finding new employment is essentially a full-time job in itself. Depending on your personal circumstances, be prepared to dedicate up to 40 hours a week. The whole process could take several months. Fortunately, you have an abundance of resources and tools at your fingertips to facilitate the job-search process. Using these tools effectively can drastically reduce the time it takes to find a job.
Landing a job that suits your career and lifestyle goals is more than simply applying to a few jobs on search engines. Especially in the current environment, you need to devise a thoughtfully planned job search strategy that can give you a real advantage. Once you do so, you can execute your strategy to maximize your chances of success.
The path to employment involves:
The Value of Handwritten Notes
Whenever I happen to stop in a Hallmark store, I’m just astounded as to the wide variety of greeting cards on display in there.
There are cards for birthdays, wedding anniversaries, bridal showers, engagements, weddings, new babies, job promotions, new jobs, good-byes, graduations, passing a big test, recovering from illness or surgery, sympathy, apology, christenings, baptisms, bar mitzvahs… and that doesn’t even touch the seasonal cards, like Veteran’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Christmas, and so on.
All of these cards are there to express the same basic sentiment: that you’re thinking of someone during some special occasion.
Don’t get me wrong, that sentiment is a great thing. It’s wonderful when people take the time to think of each other on important occasions.
50 Fun Free Activities My Family Enjoys
One of the most popular articles I’ve ever written for The Simple Dollar is 100 Things to Do During a Money-Free Weekend. In it, I touch upon the idea of a “money-free weekend” – one in which you consciously avoid the active spending of money – and then drop a long list of activities you can take on during such a weekend.
Sarah and I often did “money-free weekends” when we first started our financial recovery and we still do them every once in a while. When we first began, however, we had only a single child at home, a baby, who we could simply take along to many of the more adult-oriented activities that we would do. If you’ll notice, that list is mostly full of stuff that works best for adults.
Are Ethanol-Blended Fuels a Bargain?
Ethanol Added and Premium Fuels Are a Questionable Bargain
Over the last year, I’ve been keeping careful track of the fuel efficiency of my 2004 Honda Pilot. You know the vehicle – it’s the one I bought off of Craigslist a few years back.
My driving in the vehicle is an almost equal mix of highway driving, interstate driving, and stop-and-go driving in town. The terrain in central Iowa is mostly flat, but there are a few hills here and there. Over the last year, which amounts to the last twenty two fill-ups using a variety of fuels, the vehicle has averaged 19.1 miles per gallon.
Reached Your Financial Limit? Fourteen Key Steps To Turn Your Finances Around
One of the interesting parts of running a popular website like The Simple Dollar is that you get to see the terms that people type into Google when they’re searching for your site. So, if someone types “money management” into Google and then eventually click on my site somewhere in the results for that term, it can be seen in the site statistics.
I love looking at these terms because they often give me clues as to what people want to see on the site. I’m not so much interested in the popular terms – if 100 people type in a particular term and find The Simple Dollar, I know I’m covering it well.
What I’m interested in are the search terms that have just one or two results. Those search strings often tell a story… and they often stick right into my heart. Some examples:
in debt scared help
how do i fix finances?
need help repaying debt
Parents and Children and Other Things
What’s inside? Here are the questions answered in today’s reader mailbag, boiled down to five word summaries. Click on the number to jump straight down to the question.
1. Parents and gifts
2. Balance transfer question
3. Best free children’s educational programs
4. Non-monthly budget items
5. Acorns?
6. Product codes
7. Mortgage strategy
8. Frustrated with sister’s family
9. Clothes overload!
Building a Meaningful Life from the Bottom Up
One of the biggest struggles of modern life is the search for meaning and purpose.
Most of the time, we go through our day-to-day lives just accomplishing the things we need to get done and relishing the spare time that’s left over. It can feel a lot like jogging on a treadmill, where life is running backwards and we’re running just to stay in place and not fall off the back end.
I know that there are been large periods of my life where I have felt this way – and those feelings still pop up from time to time. My to-do list of the tasks I have to accomplish by the end of a given day often feels incredible.
The Razor Experiment: Smart Tactics for Razor Blades
I’ve been clean shaven for almost my entire adult life (aside from a disastrous beard experiment in college). Over those years, I’ve tried a number of different solutions for keeping a clean shave and, over the last several years, I’ve focused on ways to keep my face cleared without breaking the bank.
These experiments have taught me several things about getting a great shave at a very low price. Here’s what I’ve learned.
A Safety Razor Is the Cheapest Option
In terms of inexpensive shaving, there really isn’t any comparison that I’ve found (aside from shaving with a straight razor, which I’ll be skipping on because the idea of holding a gigantic blade like that next to my neck doesn’t sound appealing in the least) that holds up to the cost-per-shave of a safety razor.
Sixteen Tricks for Maximizing a Small Home or Apartment
When Sarah and I were first married in 2003, we moved into a pretty small apartment. According to what I could find online about it, it measured in at about 550 square feet.
We viewed it as a temporary solution. It was okay for just the two of us, but we wanted a family and an apartment like that wasn’t going to work with children.
Or so we thought.
In 2005, our first child arrived. We didn’t have the financial resources at the time to buy a house, so we stayed in that little apartment. We took one of the rooms and converted roughly half of it into a nursery for the baby.
And it worked. The two years where we lived as a “dual income no kid” family had taught us some tricks about living in a tight space, and adding a baby to the picture taught us some more tricks.
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