Welcome back! It's good to see you again. Please note that I am now publishing all new material at my hub site: StephenPSmith.com

Today’s guest post is from Mike St. Pierre of The Daily Saint.

So how do you interview and land the job you want,

at the salary you desire,

with the benefits you need?

It’s as simple as J.O.B. training, says career expert Mark Schnurman.  Mark’s piece in the Star Ledger this past week was phenomenal.  You can read the online link here.  In sum, Mark breaks down the process of selling yourself into three categories.

First, it’s important to convince your interviewer that you have JOB SPECIFIC SKILLS.  If you are interviewing for a job in car sales, it’s important to stress your ability to close the deal, maintain relationships well after the sale is made, etc.  The interviewer needs to hear that you can handle the 3-4 key skills that are absolutely necessary for the job.

Next, Mark suggests that you support your job specific skills with OVERALL SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE.  If you have a lot of experience, stress this.  If your character is amazingly solid, emphasize that.  If you’ve never been sick in the last ten years, mention this.  These are the “soft” qualities that people too often stress first in an interview. It’s not that they’re not important- they are.  The key is to wrap them around your job specific skills.

Finally, Mark recommends that you emphasize how much you would BE A GOOD FIT for the organization.  This is a culture question- would you be a good match for the general vibe of the culture in which you’re hoping to work?  Don’t fake it, just be yourself.  I would recommend that you interview within a culture that you accept and see the good in.  If youre only interest is in making an organization different from what it currently is (I think we would put that in the “hatchet man” category), there might be some room for deeper reflection.

GTD APPLICATION

From a GTD perspective, interviewing and finding the job you want is just another outflow of your project list.  As Stephen has often posted here at Productivity in Context, a running list of all of your projects is essential to productivity.  Here’s how the landing of your new job could play out in a project list:

1. List “New Job” as a project
2. List “Next Actions” such as: identify 3 online job banks, call 4 contacts for advice, edit resume

Then go to it!  When you have a trajectory playing out in your mind and in your projects list, your job hunt will go smoother.  You won’t feel like to you have to be job searching at every hour of the day (thank God!) and the job you want will eventually come your way.  If it sounds too simplistic, it’s not.  I’ve used this process many times and it always pays off.  Good luck!

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/ahxsxd. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

My friend Marina Martin [ Sufficient Thrust ] has a terrific resource for setting New Year’s Resolutions that you should take a look at. I used this little booklet last year and it made an amazing difference in my effectiveness, in fact I accomplished all but two of my goals!

In my work here as a Productivity evangelist I have tried, experimented with, and discarded a ton of applications, methods, and practices for setting goals and getting them done. This one works. Martin says:

I’m the very definition of a Type-A personality and have worked as an efficiency consultant for years, so making lists and plans is second nature to me. Something I’ve come to believe strongly is that Type-A personalities perform best when we have specific action steps, as opposed to paragraphs of theory. The blogosphere is certainly full of posts about resolutions, but I couldn’t find anything that satisfied my craving for step-by-step success — so I made it myself! I use this exact same process myself whenever I have a goal to achieve, with great results, and I’m excited that others have benefited from it too.

Since I am such a laid-back, relaxed person this type of system appealed to me. How does this resolution-defining system work?

The Perfect New Year’s Resolution

The #1 reason why people don’t achieve their resolutions is because their resolutions weren’t really resolutions at all.

It’s no secret around here that I’m big on goal-setting. However, New Year’s Resolutions are a very specific kind of goal.

A New Year’s Resolution has to meet the following criteria:

* It must be achievable by 11:59pm on December 31 of that calendar year.
* It must be measurable AND specific. In other words, a complete stranger should easily be able to objectively determine whether or not you’ve achieved it.
* It should positively impact your life, if only indirectly.
* A process of events should be required in order to achieve it. “Visit Kenya” doesn’t count if you normally travel and it’s within your financial means and comfort zone. It would count, however, if you had to come up with some way of financing the trip, or if you moved there for a month, or if you were having an existential crisis about hippos and were going there to confront your fears.

Martin recommends creating 4-6 specific, actionable goals for the new year, and provides a resource for breaking those goals down into action steps. For example:

A lousy Resolution: “Lose weight”
A better one: “Lose 20lbs”
A really good example: “Weigh 134lbs naked on the morning of December 31″
And simply awesome: “Run three miles without stopping wearing XXS Aerie sweatpants”

The awesome version of this resolution not only incorporates two common goals — losing weight and exercising more — into one, but it also focuses on one of the real reasons we want to lose weight: to fit into a smaller clothing size. It doesn’t matter what number the scale shows if your pants won’t fit!

Read more about it and download the Ultimate Guide to New Year’s Resolutions here. And let’s all give Marina a big hug and thank you for sharing this resource with us!

For more help in keeping up your motivation and getting some accountability, you may want to get involved with Leo Babauta’s new 30 Day Challenge forum.

If you need even more help, or just want to discuss how to make 2009 your best year yet, feel free to drop me a line: Contact Stephen.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/8syo2y. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

Ever since I started my Getting Things Done practice 2 years ago, I have struggled with my system of reviews. Primarily due to my ADD, but also because of the many, many changes and transitions that my household has undergone in that time.

Since the Lovely Bride and I were married in March of 2005 we have moved 4 times, lived in 3 different states, and had 11 different jobs (combined). That is a LOT of change and those of you who know me personally know that I can have trouble adapting to change.

Since we are once again in the middle of an enormous transition I have taken the opportunity to get a head start on my Annual Review. It turns out that in spite of (or perhaps because of) the challenges 2008 was a pretty darned good year.

• Our marriage is strong. The Lovely Bride and I have faced some serious challenges, at home and with her career, but we have remained strong, positive, and pro-active about making things happen.
• We are ahead of the curve. With the economy in the state that it is, we were able to look forward and make some choices and take actions to stay out of the worst of the troubles:
  • Beating the Christmas rush - we started buying presents in March, and were able to finish in October. All of our gifts for family and friends were wrapped, packed, and shipped by the first week of November. What an amazing feeling to have all of that done during this week of Christmas! Buying gifts this way allowed us to avoid a massive hit to the budget during a fairly lean period, as well as providing the opportunity to find things in our travels that would be personal and special for the recipient.
  • Living with less - both of us have a tendency to hoard “stuff”, and we have been moving boxes of junk from place to place for 3 years. This fall we decided that boxes that have not been unpacked in two years are likely to contain things that we do not need. We did a massive sort-and-purge, donating a ton of clothes, books, and small appliances to charity.
  • Creating alternate income streams - both of us have worked in the hospitality industry for most of our careers and a down economy hits that segment hard. We have been creating products and services that we can sell online, and in October I took the leap and went to work for myself.
• I started my own business. And business is pretty good! The main site is called Business Development in Context and I have been writing about Social Media, Blogging, and Networking for success. I have found a handful of clients, and some clients have found me. I am not making a fortune (yet) but it is paying the bills and financing our adventure. The funny thing is, I work as many or more hours than I did when I had a “real job” yet it is so much more rewarding, fulfilling, and enjoyable. I should have done this years ago!!
• I accomplished nearly all of my goals for the year. In January of 2008 I sat down with a workbook on goal-setting and laid out a plan for achieving some goals over the course of the year. (In no particular order)
  • I lost 25 pounds and kept it off.
  • I started a new blog for business purposes, and it is growing.
  • I attending the SOBCon conference in Chicago and learned a LOT about this business of blogging.
  • I paid off one of the credit cards.
  • I purchased a new laptop computer.
  • I took a job as a paid writer online.
  • I joined a Chamber of Commerce and got involved with the local business community.
  • I spent at least one full day each week with the Lovely Bride doing something fun and building our relationship.
• Use a more positive vocabulary -My Lovely Bride asked me to add this point as her contribution. I have always been a very optimistic person, but since we have been married my wife says that learning to use a positive outlook rather than a negative one creates a much different framework for approaching a problem.

Now it is your turn. How was 2008 for you? What did you learn, achieve, or accomplish? Be sure to share in the Comments. Later in the week we will look at setting some achievable SMART goals for 2009.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/957gqy. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

Productivity advice from Seth Godin:
Is effort a myth?

With that forewarning, here’s a bootstrapper’s/marketer’s/entrepreneur’s/fast-rising executive’s effort diet. Go through the list and decide whether or not it’s worth it. Or make up your own diet. Effort is a choice, at least make it on purpose:

1. Delete 120 minutes a day of ’spare time’ from your life. This can include TV, reading the newspaper, commuting, wasting time in social networks and meetings. Up to you.

2. Spend the 120 minutes doing this instead:

* Exercise for thirty minutes.
* Read relevant non-fiction (trade magazines, journals, business books, blogs, etc.)
* Send three thank you notes.
* Learn new digital techniques (spreadsheet macros, Firefox shortcuts, productivity tools, graphic design, html coding)
* Volunteer.
* Blog for five minutes about something you learned.
* Give a speech once a month about something you don’t currently know a lot about.

3. Spend at least one weekend day doing absolutely nothing but being with people you love.

4. Only spend money, for one year, on things you absolutely need to get by. Save the rest, relentlessly.

If you somehow pulled this off, then six months from now, you would be the fittest, best rested, most intelligent, best funded and motivated person in your office or your field. You would know how to do things other people don’t, you’d have a wider network and you’d be more focused.

What would you do with 120 minutes?

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5gh894. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen