Eliminating Distractions in Your Executive Job Search

An executive’s work is never done. There’s always a call being put through, an emergency meeting called at a moment’s notice or another email marked ‘urgent’. Living a life full of unpaid, unnoticed overtime and extra, ‘hidden’ responsibilities and duties is taxing enough at the best of times. Throw in a job search and your timetable is in danger of becoming chaotic. Every time you arrange to do something pertaining to your job hunt—be it researching the organisation you want to move to, enrolling in a short course to learn a new skill or attending a networking event, something to do with your current work distracts you from seeing your plan through. However, if you keep letting these distractions win, you’ll never get round to finding a new job. What are you to do?

One of the most fundamental things to do at the outset of any job search is to create a plan and a timetable. Arrange definite times and timeframes for achieving short, medium and long-term job seeking tasks.  If you have a timeline like this written down, you’re more likely to stick to the schedule than if you’ve just vaguely pencilled in the words ‘look for a job’ on random days in your diary.

Of course, even if you have a detailed timetable, the challenge is to keep to it when, out of the corner of your eye, you see your inbox at work filling up with papers or our inbox on the screen flicking in new messages —all of which are marked ‘urgent’. The answer to this is to simply accept that not all tasks are ‘urgent’. You may have to redefine your definition of urgent, but it’s definitely worth doing so. Once you’ve established which work issues and scenarios are genuinely urgent, you can afford to ignore everything else during your designated job search time.

But what happens when something that is genuinely urgent forces you to abandon your job search time? The first thing to do is to realise it’s not the end of the world. Yes, your job hunt has been interrupted, but it’s only a temporary interruption. Once the work matter is dealt with, go back to what you were doing as quickly as possible. Don’t waste any more precious time by thinking ‘well, I might as well check my emails/check in with my secretary/make another coffee now’. Get back into it straight away in order to minimize the damage done by the interruption.

A lot of this is about attitude. Being smart with your time and reacting in the right way to distractions will help you land your next job sooner rather than later.