Iranians used Twitter to expose the corrupt elections and political turmoil in 2009. It had a profound ripple effect on how Social Media is used. And it was an A-ha moment for Recruiters globally.

Just like the stifled Iranian protests that seeped through Twitter feeds, 2010 will be about controlling what the outside world thinks about your company.

This is where Recruiters enter and exit…

Enter….

Recruiters use every social media websites to find candidates, right? But Recruiters also deal with the bad pub that is generated on blogs, comments, tweets, pictures, and anything on the web. So, attracting top talent is a BIG challenge if the company doesn’t have a good reputation.

Now Exit…

How your company maintains its employment brand (or in some cases cleans it up) will NOT fall into the Recruiters role.

This means…

Employment Branding Campaigns will be controlled by HR and where Recruiters just chip in to be a pair of hands.

The very place you find candidates will also be the platform for HR to deploy Employment Branding initiatives and programs.

Your job, the Recruiter, in 2010 is to find talent and deliver a uniform message or “The Employment Brand”.

Think about it….

Using Social Media to deliver a positive message is part of the job now. AND, Recruiters will take to social media websites a uniform message to attract top talent and at the same time counter the bad public image it already has.

Iranian politics has something in common with Employment Branding Projects – social media sites (like Twitter) will be under a watchful eye and controlled at all times.

——–

Read recent blog post Welcome Back Eager Beavers

]]> http://fixcv.com/iranian-politics-and-employment-branding-have-something-in-common-4587.html/feed 0 http://fixcv.com/the-most-important-service-level-agreement-3971.html http://fixcv.com/the-most-important-service-level-agreement-3971.html#comments Tue, 07 Sep 2010 18:39:12 +0000 fixcv http://fixcv.com/?p=3971

In our recent post, the Backlash is Back, we promised to discuss “game changing”, low tech techniques/tactics (we call them web 0.0) that Elite Recruiters execute flawlessly 95% of the time!

To kick off that discussion, last week Bradley provided thoughts and ideas about being a Strategic Business Partner and the importance of defining the staffing process and setting service level agreements (or SLAs) with your hiring manager.

To me, the most important Service Level Agreement you can set with your hiring manager to manage initial expectations and improve and maintain excellent customer service is – - Requisition Received to “first submittal”.

Defined: This is the time that occurs between you as the recruiter receiving and qualifying the requisition from the hiring manager to the time you send over the first pre-screened, qualified candidates for consideration (or a pre-determined # or slate of qualified candidates).

9 times out of 10, when you ask a hiring manager the question during the intake session – - “when do you need this person” . . .

They respond – - “yesterday” or “ASAP“.

And probably 9 times out of 10, recruiters walk away from that discussion without setting an expectation of when the hiring manager should start to see quality applicant flow from them.

Will you have candidates to interview in 2 days? 10 days? never?

I wrote an article on this subject last August that I thought you might want to check out.

In addition – - if you are interested in an example of a Staffing Process Service Level Agreement and how we have this question defined in our Intake session, please email us.

Have a productive, Perfect Day

David Szary

Go here to see the original: ERE.net Community

A preliminary report on the ICANN board meeting earlier this month shows that the decision to expand the use of .jobs Internet addresses had at least one opponent.

Of the 15 voting members of the board of the Internet addressing authority (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), 14 participated in the Aug. 5 closed, teleconference. When it came time to vote, one board member opposed the expansion, two abstained, leaving 11 in favor.

The report, which appears to have been posted Monday, doesn’t detail who abstained and who cast the “No” vote. That will have to await the official minutes, which won’t be publicly available until after the next board meeting on Oct. 28th.

The report also says little about the nature of the discussion about the request by Employ Media to issue .jobs addresses using geographic, occupational, professional, or other words (i.e. Boston.jobs, javaengineers.jobs, etc.). All it says is, ”The Board discussed with staff the process taken for the proposed amendment in the .JOBS sTLD, and raised questions regarding the scope of change this amendment would have on the charter of the sTLD.”

It’s not unusual for the ICANN board to split votes or for some board members to abstain. At the same meeting it approved the .jobs expansion and the plan for making available the new names, the board split a vote over creating native language-based Internet domain extensions for Jordan, the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and Tunisia. That vote was nine in favor, two opposed, and three abstentions. Another split vote occurred over paying the board chairman $75,000 a year.

Go here to see the original: ERE Articles

There’s an FAQ on the new site, Talentag, that asks the right question: “What is Talentag and why do you need it?”

Precisely what I was wondering after reading the TechCrunch Europe post about this site. The answer to the first half is straightforward enough. Talentag is the online equivalent of the afterwork social hour; think of it as what LinkedIn would be if it was more like Facebook and less like, well, less like LinkedIn.

Of course that’s not how the site explains it. The answer there is more of a description of what it does. For instance: “Your co-workers and friends can tag you with words or a badge and they can also vouch (for) a particular role you worked together.”

In other words, it’s a way to create a social CV. Talentag connects to your profiles on other social media and will import your work history and friends lists. Then you can connect to them on Talentag and ask them for feedback, get tagged, and, for grins, award and receive badges.

How useful is this to a recruiter? Probably not a whole lot. You can’t use it for sourcing, since searches are limited to your existing inventory of connections from LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Your Talentag friends are pulled in from Facebook, which aren’t too useful for those of us who use Facebook strictly for fun. It’s a point TechCrunch makes, too.

Vouching might have some usefulness in keeping candidates honest. But the feedback and tags? Probably not even as useful as the list of references a candidate supplies.

That said, the site may well evolve into something recruiters might find helpful. For instance, corporate recruiters with a Facebook page could create a Talentag profile, import those Facebook friends, and invite them to create their own “social CVs,” as TechCrunch calls them.

That’s just one for instance. Right now, it’s a long way to go. Don’t count it out though. TechCrunch says the founders are building in more utility. They are the same folks, by the way, that launched Emp.ly, the social media job posting service.

Here is the original post: ERE Articles

In a joint venture with the manager of the .jobs domain, DirectEmployers has launched the first of what might become tens of thousands of new geographically and occupationally focused job boards all sharing a .jobs extension.

The new sites, identical in design and structure, made their appearance earlier this month. Among them are Atlanta.jobs, Boston.jobs, Mexico.jobs, and India.jobs.

“We just started pushing them out,” says Chad Sowash, VP of business development for DirectEmployers, a non-profit HR consortium, that has recruiting as its focus. Among its services is the Job Central job board, to which members can post jobs without additional fee.

“It’s a new playing field,” Sowash adds. “What this is going to do is allow thousands more, perhaps tens of thousands more” sites where job seekers can look for jobs.

Assuming job seekers ever become aware of the existence of a domain offering only jobs and career information, then those looking for opportunities in a specific geography — Atlanta, for example — need only enter that area and the extension .jobs. Those looking for an occupation-specific opportunity enter the title and the .jobs extension.

Members of the DirectEmployers consortium can request the creation of any site name they think will be of benefit, said Sowash, suggesting an oil company might want to use  refinery.jobs for its openings.

“It won’t belong to any company, but if a company wants us to offer a name, we can. The registrar isn’t selling these domains. They still have them,” Sowash explained. “We can light up every combination someone can think of.”

Tom Embrescia, CEO of Employ Media, the administrator and manager — registrar, in Internet parlance — of the .jobs domain, said the venture with DirectEmployers is a “great way to see what the world wants.”

The domain — technically a sponsored top-level domain — was pitched to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) by Employ Media and its partner the Society for Human Resource Management. The proposal, approved in 2005, argued that a .jobs extension would make it easy for job seekers to find the career site of individual companies and would provide a modicum of protection against scam job postings.

Companies could only get a .jobs address by using the company name and by pledging to adhere to the SHRM code of ethics.

Although about 15,000 companies signed up for the .jobs address, job seekers are largely unaware of its existence. As a consequence, most .jobs addresses get little traffic.

Building sites on the “reserved” occupational and geographic addresses, says Embrescia, is a marketing experiment. “It’s a beta test,” he says, explaining later in the conversation, “We need to build consumer awareness that these (addresses) exist.”

Besides providing the technology to power the job boards, DirectEmployers’ dozens of Fortune 500 and 1000 members will be encouraged to promote them. “Now I’ve got Fortune 1000 companies working,” Embrescia beamed.

Besides members of DirectEmployers, other firms with a .jobs domain address will also be able to post their jobs to the new sites.

For member companies posting jobs to Job Central, the additional placement on geographic and occupational sites will be automatic, Sowash told me. They are also likely to get a premium posting position.

Non-members, who own a .jobs address, might have to post their jobs manually or pay a fee for automation.

Others who want to post to these sites might have to pay a posting fee, or have some other limitation.

“The rules haven’t been hammered out,” says Sowash. There’s also a 40-company advisory group providing input on site names, practices, and feedback on the design and functionality of the job boards, which, Sowash is quick to point out, don’t look like job boards. “These are not going to look like your father’s job board,” he vows.

I asked Sowash whether he and DirectEmployers expected push back or opposition to its exclusive deal with Employ Media. “Yeah,” he acknowledged, “we’ll probably hear from some people who are not too happy.” But he didn’t anticipate resistance from the job boards, most of whom are struggling in the economy and couldn’t take on a project of this magnitude.

Bob Etheridge, a co-founder of JobCircle and a former VP of another job board, GettheJob, says he suspects “job board owners are walking the fence, trying to determine are they friends or are they foes.”

There’s suspicion now that Employ Media is not only a names registrar, but “they are getting in the publisher business.”

Those quoted here and others who talked with me either for background or anonymously all supported DirectEmployers for its aggressiveness and initiative.

DirectEmployers approached Employ Media with a proposal almost a year ago, but Embrescia said he wasn’t ready then. Conversation resumed about the time Embrescia publicly floated the idea of selling off the reserved names.

“They had a good plan and when we were ready we talked with them,” Employ Media’s Embrescia said. Their facility with the technology, flexibility, and non-profit status, and their enthusiasm were convincing factors.

Still, a top executive with a leading job board who asked not to be named, said he initially was upset over the lack of openness in the process of developing the joint venture. Now, though, he doubts the new sites will do anything more than simply add to the already cluttered job board environment.

Coming at it from a different perspective, Gerry Crispin, CareerXroads co-founder and a leading recruitment consultant, complained that the latest turn means an end to “the embedded, implied promise” that all the jobs on a .jobs site would be legitimate and are those of the company whose name appeared before the extension.

“It no longer has the same aspirational goals,” laments Crispin, a member of the original SHRM advisory group that supported the .jobs creation. “It’s still milk, but there’s no guarantee it’s pasteurized.”

Original post created by: ERE Articles

Economists expect that tomorrow’s jobs report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics will show 175,000 jobs were lost in September, the smallest since July 2008.

A Bloomberg survey also says economists expect the unemployment rate to rise to 9.8 percent, the highest since 1983. An ADP report released this morning foreshadows the lower, yet still continuing job loss. The ADP National Employment Report says the U.S. lost 254,000 private, nonfarm jobs in September, a drop of 23,000 from the revised August jobs report. It’s the lowest drop that ADP has recorded since August 2008.

Government economic reports released today showed the tentativeness of the U.S. recovery. A Commerce Department report said consumer spending in August was up 1.3 points, the biggest rise in eight years, and the fourth increase in a row. But fueled as it was by the Cash for Clunkers program, economists warn not to expect anything similar when the September results are reported at the end of this month.

Meanwhile, the Monster Employment Index, also released this morning, was down two points from September, while yet another report, this one from the Labor Department today, said 551,000 first-time claims for unemployment were filed last week, 17,000 more than the previous week and 20,000 more than the consensus of the 41 economists polled by Bloomberg.

Then there is the report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas which says fewer layoffs were announced in September than in any month since March 2008. The 66,404 layoffs tallied in the report are 10,000 fewer than in August and 30 percent lower than in September last year.

Today’s reports prompted the New York Times to start its story this way:

“A fusillade of economic reports released Thursday showed the economy’s rebound off the bottom seems to be leveling off, and that any recovery may come in fits and starts over the rest of the year.”

That seems to precisely describe what most of us have been sensing instinctively: Things may not be getting much worse, but they don’t seem to be getting better either.

In separate conversations with two attendees of this week’s HR Tech show in Chicago, both mentioned that they had been told by vendors who sell overseas and recruiters who work globally that Europe and Asia are recovering more rapidly than the U.S.

There’s a much greater hesitancy to commit (to purchases or hires) here than in the rest of the world, one of the two offered.

That feeling seems evident in the Consumer Confidence Index released by The Conference Board Tuesday. The Index was off by 1.3 points, a small decline, to be sure, but part of a pattern that began in May.

After rising almost 30 points between February and May, the Index has leveled off, hovering right around 50.0. The Index is a measure of how consumer confidence compares to 1985, when the Index was set to 100. So while confidence isn’t dropping much, it isn’t improving either.

Reporting the numbers, Lynn Franco, director of The Conference Board Consumer Research Center, said, “While not as pessimistic as earlier this year, consumers remain quite apprehensive about the short-term outlook and their incomes. With the holiday season quickly approaching, this is not very encouraging news.”

An economist quoted in the Bloomberg story summed up conditions this way,

“The economy is on track for a jobless recovery, and unemployment will likely remain high well into next year,” said Sal Guatieri, a senior economist at BMO Capital Markets in Toronto. “We’re just not seeing a pickup in hiring. It means a long road to full recovery.”

Original post created by: ERE Articles

A raft of recent surveys shows that the recession is having a profound impact on workers and employment trends worldwide. Even though they measure different things — global hiring, immigration repatriation, and career trends — there’s a theme here, which is that the economy is global and when it recovers, things will not go back to the way they were.

There’s the report from Monster this week that says vast numbers of workers are ready to switch careers for a new job. Another survey, this one from SearchPath International and Antal International, give us a global view of hiring — and firing — trends.

The Global Snapshot offers clues to where the hottest markets in the world are for managers and professionals. (Hint: Think Russia, China, India, Egypt, and Eastern Europe.)

That report dovetails with last week’s USA Today report about an emerging brain drain of managers and professionals from the U.S. to China and India.

Vivek Wadhwa

Vivek Wadhwa, executive in residence at Duke University and a senior research associate at Harvard University, surveyed some 1,200 immigrants who returned to their native country. He reports that improved opportunities at home, coupled with U.S. visa policies, makes it likely that up to 200,000 white collar migrants will return to China and India in the next five years.

A UPI version of the story includes this comment from Wang Baodong, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington: “China needs a lot of well-trained personnel.”

No surprise there, especially no surprise after you peek at The Global Snapshot report that says 74 percent of the surveyed companies in China report they are hiring skilled managers and other white collar professionals now. Also not surprisingly, the report commentary notes that there has been a better than 10 percent rise in the companies shedding workers, which the report notes, suggests “that employers are taking advantage of current conditions to ‘weed out’ less productive members of staff.”

Other hot Asian markets for these same workers: Singapore, Pakistan and Hong Kong. India is bit less robust with 51 percent of the surveyed companies hiring now. But give it a quarter and 66 percent say they’ll be looking for managers and professionals.

In the U.S., 55 percent of respondents report hiring, with the same percentage planning to hire next quarter.

The recession has also got workers thinking that it may be wise to find a new career.

Monster released a poll of workers in North America and Europe showing 89 percent of them would consider or would make a career change if it meant finding a new job. While only 11 percent of the 22,444 visitors to Monster’s sites in Europe, Canada, or the U.S. said they wouldn’t change careers — at least not now — 49 percent said they’ve been wanting to change careers and are ready now.

In Spain, 92 percent of the visitors to the Monster site who took the poll said they were ready to make a career change. They’re feeling the pressure; 44 percent said they feel they must take the first job that comes along. That percentage contrasts sharply with respondents elsewhere, only 23 percent of whom felt they needed to pretty much take anything.

No doubt those who visit Monster sites are motivated job seekers, and probably more willing to switch industries than those who aren’t looking. But when half of those taking the poll answer the question, “Would you consider a job in another industry?” with a “Yes, I’ve been wanting to make a career change,” you can figure that change is underway.

Original post: ERE Articles

There’s a report out that should be a wake-up for the procrastinators in the class of 2010. The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) says employers are cutting back next year’s college hiring plans by 7 percent.

That may not seem like much until you consider that employers reduced this year’s college grad hiring by 21 percent. That seven percent is on top of this year’s cuts, meaning that there will be almost 30 26.53 percent fewer jobs being offered to the current crop of seniors than their counterparts had in 2008.

For comparison, each NACE Job Outlook from 2004 to the spring of 2008 predicted double-digit increases in college senior hiring. The spring 2008 hiring preview predict 8.1 percent growth.

Besides cutting back on their hiring, NACE’s Job Outlook 2010 Fall Preview says employers are shifting their recruiting to the spring. Not in big numbers; only about a 5 percent change from the 2008 survey when the split was 63 percent planned to hire in the fall, while the rest were looking to the spring.

The only region of the U.S. that expects to increase college hiring is the northeast, though only by about 5 percent, which, if you are following the numbers here, will still be below the 2007 hiring level.

“Traditionally, employers tend to be conservative about their college hiring when the economy is in flux,” says Marilyn Mackes, NACE executive director. “Although employers anticipate doing most of their recruiting in the fall, we are seeing some movement to recruit in the spring. This is likely due to anticipation that the economic recovery will be underway by then.”

What this means for college seniors should be self-evident: Get a resume, portfolio, or profile together now; network with alums, professors, your parents friends, and your friends’ parents; go to the on-campus job fairs; talk to the careers office, even if you think it’s lame. If you’ve been thinking of grad school, apply and at least keep the  option open.

For recruiters, the survey suggests opportunities to hire top seniors who might have had their sights set on bigger fish. With fewer jobs and fewer employers pursuing them, even the kids at the top of the class are likely to be more willing to consider smaller firms who aggressively recruit now, instead of next spring.

Don’t make the mistake, though, that it will be a cakewalk to get the best. I got an unusual press release pitching the benefits of an internship with SRC (formerly Syracuse Research Corporation) in Syracuse, NY. It’s unusual in that it is the first internship sales pitch in a press release we can recall receiving at ERE.

The first line of the release says SRC is sweetening its internship benefits “specifically to increase the number of top applicants and retain the best talent for full-time positions.” By the way, “sweet” is the right adjective to apply to the internship benefits. The company is offering to pay for the temporary relocation costs of interns, a housing stipend, referral bonus to former interns, paying positions after the internship as campus ambassadors for SRC, tuition assistance, and more.

What’s more, the research and development firm makes a point of telling interns that they’ll be involved in important and valuable work almost from the moment they arrive. “SRC interns are involved in the same activities as full time employees, including research, design and development, customer interaction and occasional business travel,” the press release says.

The original post: ERE Articles

It could be an uncomfortable 60 minutes tomorrow for Monster’s CEO when he presents the company’s 2nd quarter numbers during a conference call with Wall Street analysts.

Yahoo Finance says analysts are expecting Monster to earn a penny a share on revenues of about $225 million. Last year for the same quarter, the company had sales of $354.3 million. In the first quarter of this year, Monster had a loss.

I have no particular insight on what the revenue and expense numbers will be. Instead, I’m looking at traffic numbers released by comScore the other day that show Monster’s job audience grew 6 percent in the 12 months since June 2008. Meanwhile, the number of Americans visiting all career services and development sites grew 10 percent.

That means Monster captured only 60 percent of the category’s growth. CareerBuilder, the leading job board by traffic and North American revenue, saw its traffic decline by 1 percent. Among the big three general job boards in the U.S., only Yahoo’s HotJobs bested the category growth, growing at a brisk 23 percent.

However, the clear winner among the top 10 most trafficked sites is Indeed.com, which grew at a blistering 59 percent. The job search engine now ranks fourth among the most trafficked job sites, according to comScore.

At the other end, and surprisingly still among the top 10 sites, is Brassring.com. Traffic there dropped 11 percent over the year, a not-surprising turn considering the site became a job board for Kenexa since its acquisition by the HR software firm at the end of 2006. What is surprising is that the site still gets 2 million unique visitors a month.

Monster’s traffic growth is particularly troubling for the company, which relaunched the site in January with a big marketing push, including, in February, its first Super Bowl commercials since 2004. Much of Monster’s first quarter loss — some $27 million — was attributed to the big marketing push.

CEO Sal Iannuzzi told analysts when the 1st quarter numbers were released that the millions spent on marketing were already showing results. “We are gaining market share,” Iannuzzi declared. “We are declining less than the competition.”

On a traffic basis, that isn’t the case. The evidence from comScore suggests that Monster isn’t even back to the numbers it saw in Sept. 2008, when it had 17.92 million unique visitors. In January, when the revamped site launched and Monster’s Super Bowl buildup gave it a boost, it had 17.91 million visitors. Bad news for Monster, though. The site’s traffic dropped 12 percent the next month, despite the Feb. 1 Super Bowl ads and a fan promotion with the NFL.

CareerBuilder, which had its own Super Bowl ads, also saw a February decline. It went from 24.75 million visitors to 20.08 million.

Declines from January to February are fairly typical for job boards. Job searching tends to be cyclical, with big jumps in January as people make good on resolutions and shift out of holiday mode. The numbers drop, level off, then decline during the summer for what should be obvious reasons.  So every one of the top 10 job sites saw a one-month decline and, in fact, the entire category saw a drop of 9 percent.

I contacted Monster and CareerBuilder to discuss the numbers, but have yet to hear from Monster. CareerBuilder spokeswoman Jennifer Grasz sent an email saying only, “CareerBuilder has been and continues to be the category leader.”

On the other hand, Paul Forster, co-founder and CEO of Indeed, called back to say the search engine’s torrid growth is “Very nice to see. Our model is providing to be very good from the point of view of the job seeker.”

Indeed, and its nearest competitor, SimplyHired (also in the top 10) launched five years ago and have quickly built a following through word of mouth and aggressive partnering. Both sites aggregate job listings from other job boards, direct employers, and elsewhere and also sell their own postings. Besides searching directly on the main sites, both Indeed and SimplyHired redistribute listings through their partners and other job boards, which use them to plump up their own offerings.

Over a three year period, Indeed has grown 659 percent while SimplyHired has grown 1,209 percent.

Monster, on the other hand, has lost ground during those same three years. My numbers show that in June 2006 Monster had 15.43 million unique visitors. Since then, it has lost 6.2 percent of its traffic. CareerBuilder has grown a meager 3.3 percent, while HotJobs has jumped 115.6 percent. The category itself has grown 28 percent.

What all these numbers mean is that instead of gaining job seeker market share, Monster has lost it. So has CareerBuilder. Hotjobs, once the third place job board that seemed headed out of the top 10 altogether, has meanwhile moved comfortably into second place and could, if the trend continues, become the most-trafficked job board.

The other site to watch is Indeed. It’s not likely to see a repeat of its 59 percent traffic growth, given how large the site’s traffic has already grown. But even at a growth rate of half that, Indeed could overtake Monster at about the same time HotJobs captures the top spot.

Original post created by: ERE Articles

Yesterday started with the best of intentions. I walked into my office in the morning with a vague sense of what I wanted to accomplish. Then I sat down, turned on my computer, and checked my email. Two hours later, after fighting several fires, solving other people’s problems, and dealing with whatever happened to be thrown at me through my computer and phone, I could hardly remember what I had set out to accomplish when I first turned on my computer. I’d been ambushed. And I know better.

When I teach time management, I always start with the same question: How many of you have too much time and not enough to do in it? In ten years, no one has ever raised a hand.

That means we start every day knowing we’re not going to get it all done. So how we spend our time is a key strategic decision. That’s why it’s a good idea to create a to do list and an ignore list. The hardest attention to focus is our own.

But even with those lists, the challenge, as always, is execution. How can you stick to a plan when so many things threaten to derail it? How can you focus on a few important things when so many things require your attention?

We need a trick.

Jack LaLanne, the fitness guru, knows all about tricks; he’s famous for handcuffing himself and then swimming a mile or more while towing large boats filled with people. But he’s more than just a showman. He invented several exercise machines including the ones with pulleys and weight selectors in health clubs throughout the world. And his show, The Jack LaLanne Show, was the longest running television fitness program, on the air for 34 years.

But none of that is what impresses me. He has one trick that I believe is his real secret power.

Ritual.

At the age of 94, he still spends the first two hours of his day exercising. Ninety minutes lifting weights and 30 minutes swimming or walking. Every morning. He needs to do so to achieve his goals: on his 95th birthday he plans to swim from the coast of California to Santa Catalina Island, a distance of 20 miles. Also, as he is fond of saying, “I cannot afford to die. It will ruin my image.”

So he works, consistently and deliberately, toward his goals. He does the same things day in and day out. He cares about his fitness and he’s built it into his schedule.

Managing our time needs to become a ritual too. Not simply a list or a vague sense of our priorities. That’s not consistent or deliberate. It needs to be an ongoing process we follow no matter what to keep us focused on our priorities throughout the day.

I think we can do it in three steps that take less than 18 minutes over an eight-hour workday.

STEP 1 (5 Minutes) Set Plan for Day. Before turning on your computer, sit down with a blank piece of paper and decide what will make this day highly successful. What can you realistically accomplish that will further your goals and allow you to leave at the end of the day feeling like you’ve been productive and successful? Write those things down.

Now, most importantly, take your calendar and schedule those things into time slots, placing the hardest and most important items at the beginning of the day. And by the beginning of the day I mean, if possible, before even checking your email. If your entire list does not fit into your calendar, reprioritize your list. There is tremendous power in deciding when and where you are going to do something.

In their book The Power of Full Engagement, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz describe a study in which a group of women agreed to do a breast self-exam during a period of 30 days. 100% of those who said where and when they were going to do it completed the exam. Only 53% of the others did.

In another study, drug addicts in withdrawal (can you find a more stressed-out population?) agreed to write an essay before 5 p.m. on a certain day. 80% of those who said when and where they would write the essay completed it. None of the others did.

If you want to get something done, decide when and where you’re going to do it. Otherwise, take it off your list.

STEP 2 (1 minute every hour) Refocus. Set your watch, phone, or computer to ring every hour. When it rings, take a deep breath, look at your list and ask yourself if you spent your last hour productively. Then look at your calendar and deliberately recommit to how you are going to use the next hour. Manage your day hour by hour. Don’t let the hours manage you.

STEP 3 (5 minutes) Review. Shut off your computer and review your day. What worked? Where did you focus? Where did you get distracted? What did you learn that will help you be more productive tomorrow?

The power of rituals is their predictability. You do the same thing in the same way over and over again. And so the outcome of a ritual is predictable too. If you choose your focus deliberately and wisely and consistently remind yourself of that focus, you will stay focused. It’s simple.

This particular ritual may not help you swim the English Channel while towing a cruise ship with your hands tied together. But it may just help you leave the office feeling productive and successful.

And, at the end of the day, isn’t that a higher priority?

Read the original here, by Peter Bregman @ Harvard Business Publishing