Timelines – The Four Elements Across Time
Even when you figure out what work to do, why you want to do it, how and where to do it there is still more to do to create a holistic career plan. There are two more parts to think through. Time of life vs time of career is one and creating your own plan is the other.
Time
Success in life and success at work both take effort. How you feel about your work affects everyone in your personal life, and your feelings about your personal life will affect your work. Personal life and work life always blend together. The common resource that both demand is time. You determine the time allocations in the blend.
“Success in life and success at work both take effort. And, how you feel about your work affects everyone in your personal life and your feelings about your personal life will affect your work. Personal life and work life always blend together.“
If, as is often said, time is money, then it only makes sense to invest your finite time on this planet in a manner that will “purchase” the life you want. Spend most of your time in pursuit of what you aspire to be, both personally as well as professionally. We all have the same number of hours in a day. Except for maybe sleeping, working probably takes up the biggest share of hours per week so use those hours well. Only dedication to your important priorities will get maximum value from time spent as you “purchase” what you want from life.
Priorities (plural) because you probably aspire to “be” more than one thing in life. For example you might want to be an expert at what you do at work or a good manager of people, as well as being a super spouse, and parent, a good friend, etc. Nobody gets good at anything, even those things, without learning and practicing and developing. Anything worth achieving in life will take time and practice. So you have to budget your time or you will run out of the stuff each week, then each year, then each decade until it is too late to recover and you realize you aren’t going to be some of those things.
Applying this to your career, besides articulating your aspirations as mentioned earlier, take a look into the future to see what priorities you will likely have in life, including work, and when they are most important to work on. Then allocate the right amount of available time, at the right time, against the right activities while again remembering that the window of opportunity does close for some aspirations.
Take an educated guess about your future
As an exercise, sketch out two separate timelines, a life timeline and career timeline, one above the other.
First timeline. Draw up a guesstimated timeline of the life you have ahead of you simply based on three age brackets. On this timeline, plot in events you hope will happen in your life. What are you hoping will happen in your life, for example when you are between ages 18 or 22 and say 32? How about from age 32 to say age 58? How about from 58 to 70+? Whatever brackets you are in and have left!
Here are some life examples for all the brackets. I am not saying you have to do these things in life to be happy, just that a good number of people do things like this.
Early worklife /age 18 to 32: Graduate, get an apartment, maybe a car, have a fun social life, start paying school loans, travel to explore, not to mention pay for food, clothes, the latest cell phones and other stuff.
Mid worklife /age 33 to 58: Relationships maybe get serious and a wedding happens, maybe children start arriving. A bigger apartment or house is needed, certainly there are more expenses and most importantly, time is at a premium. Your spouse needs you and now children really need you. Maybe parents need you as well. Saving for your kids college and for your retirement takes money as well.
In this time period your aspirations may not fade but your priorities may very well change from being a work title to being a work title AND a great spouse AND a great parent AND a great son or daughter. You can probably list twenty other things you envision doing with your life in this time period.
Late worklife /age 59 to 70+: By the time later career comes up, maybe the money crunch isn’t as intense because the kids are out of school and on their own, although the loans seem to live on forever. Original aspirations sometimes make a comeback. Or sometimes they morph into doing things for the good of it, like switching to non-profit work or something you can control more like consulting or freelancing. Aspirations and priorities in this phase do sometimes revolve around solidifying a legacy and or doing things for the fun of it.
OK, you have finished the first step when you have plotted out any and all potential goals you have for your life on your life timeline.
Second timeline. Draw up your career timeline. Use the same three age brackets I mentioned above.
Early career is typically where you do a lot of learning and figuring out where you belong. Mid career where you become expert at what you do and you understand the value you bring to any organization. Then late career where you either attain high levels of general management in an organization, perhaps your own, or find a specialty you like and stick with, mastering it and mentoring others coming up the ranks.
On the career timeline, plot out the milestones you would need to achieve, and by when, in order to arrive at your grand career goals.
Finally, merge the two timelines up. Synchronize the desired path of your life with the desired path of your career. Career phases and life phases lean on each other, again not for everyone, but for lots of people. One allows the other to happen. There is not so much a balance, but rather a blending.
With the two timelines superimposed over each other you can see where time is best spent to manage the upcoming opportunities to get things done as well as to manage the risks of not getting want you really want in both your career and your life.
Here are some merged timeline examples.
Take a new grad who is just starting a career. Right out of school the goal is likely to get a good job, at a decent salary, get used to the working world, and to starting applying what knowledge was acquired in school. The short-term goal, or aspiration, maybe to learn and contribute and get a promotion or two fairly quickly, setting them up to achieve their mid- life aspirations.
By the time mid career rolls around at work it is time to make your mark, take on important projects, maybe move into management if that is a desire and you are good with people. Likely though, taking on more responsibility at work usually means more time demands at work just when life priorities that demand times as well usually spike. This is typically where people risk going off their own life plan. They trade, or fail to notice that they are trading some of their life aspirations and priorities away because they stop giving them time. But life days seem to go by so slowly, and work days so quickly, that it is hard to recognize plan slippage.
When you see these opportunities and possible threats in writing on your timeline you can think about possible solutions.
So depending on your matchups, one strategy could be to go for your dreams either early in your career when typically responsibilities are at their lightest and you have plenty of time to regroup if it doesn’t work out. Or go for them later in life when, again, you have more time to spend on yourself
Or, if you are like most people, mid life / mid career is not usually the time you will want to take on a lot of risk. Like making a complete career switch, especially if it requires a hit to your salary. Unless, of course, because of your timeline matchups, you thought ahead and decided to live below your means in the early stages to build up a money reserve.
Some people do have a dream early on and go after it. Others have a mission they just have to see through or be a part of early on as well. Both types of aspirations can lead you to be someone or be something. Combining your aspirations with your strengths and your motivations to find a great role can take a bit of time and exploring. Stick with it. It can be a long but rewarding process. Make sure your career syncs up with your life’s’ priorities so you can be successful at both.
Next we will discuss the final piece of the puzzle, creating and executing a career plan for advancement.