High 5 Weekly Career Transitions Roundup: How to Balance Work and the Holidays

This is our weekly roundup of some of the best career-related articles, interviews, blogs, etc., we've read during the week. We share them so you have some great resources to prepare you for the coming week. Enjoy!

• How to Balance Work and the Holidays: "Check if your company offers an employee assistance program. If you need to take time off to just recalibrate, that is perfectly okay."

• 10 Commitments to Live a Truly Accountable Life: "If you develop a strong personal belief in the importance of these commitments, and if you begin acting on those beliefs, you will benefit from them."

• 11 Ways to Be More Productive: "The restaurant business can be unrelenting, especially when you’re shuttling between five of them. Nonetheless, the chef, restaurant owner, and cookbook author says that the experience has an upside: It makes you an excellent problem solver."

• 7 Tips for Successful Delegating: "View it as a means to free up valuable time -- more hours you can use to act on your big ideas, grow your business and achieve greater success."
• 5 Steps to Turn Experience (and Failure) Into Wisdom:"They recognize that by knowing what they did to produce a great outcome, they can repeat the actions and duplicate the result. That’s wisdom too."

5 Steps to Regain Your Focus

There are times when work seems overwhelming and we feel like we can’t possibly manage all the tasks on our to-do list. It can be particularly easy to lose focus at times like these.

Here are five steps you can take to regain your focus at work and reduce your stress and anxiety, too.

Identify tasks. Be clear on the things you need to accomplish by writing them down. If you’re a pen and paper type of person write them down in a planner or on a sheet of paper that you post nearby. Otherwise, create a list to access from your laptop or phone. You’ll also want to identify due dates for each task to help you with the next step.

Prioritize and align with company goals. Evaluate your tasks and rank them according to due dates and importance. You will also want to consider how your tasks align with your company goals. It’s possible to get distracted by tasks that are not really a priority for your company. If you’re unsure about which tasks should take priority seek out help from your manager or supervisor.

Delegate when possible. If it’s possible to hand off some tasks to other people, do so. Look through your tasks and determine whether one or more might be better handled by someone else on your team or should be moved to another department.

Remove distractions. This should be part of your every day routine but turn off your social media notifications, avoid surfing the internet, turn off your phone, and turn your attention exclusively to the task at hand.

Avoid multitasking. Notice I just wrote “the task at hand”. Singular. Not plural. Trying to multitask not only slows you down but it distracts you and makes it more difficult to get something done.

And it’s important to start small. You don’t have to tackle the biggest, most difficult task on your to-do list first. Complete one task. A small one. Gain a quick victory to start your day and propel you onto the more important work.

High 5 Weekly Career Transitions Roundup: How to Get That Promotion You Want

This is our weekly roundup of some of the best career-related articles, interviews, blogs, etc., we've read during the week. We share them so you have some great resources to prepare you for the coming week. Enjoy!

• How to Get That Promotion You Want:"Challenge yourself to list three reasons the responsibilities of the new role are better than your responsibilities now. If you can’t answer this, you have homework to do."

• Uncertainty is a Key to Success: "some of the world’s greatest thought leaders didn’t succeed because they were dead sure that they would; they succeeded because they wouldn’t allow doubt and fear of the unknown to keep them from succeeding. In other words, they embraced uncertainty."

• Why Good Leaders Delegate: "She worried that staffers might be overwhelmed by taking on work she had done, for example, handling the initial phone call with a prospective client."

• How to Make the Best of Failure: "Mentors, coaches and leaders are in a position to teach because they have made the mistakes. Failing their way through is what gave them the wisdom to lead others."
• 5 Questions to Make Sure You Want to Quite Your Job: "It’s easy to underestimate just how tightly the fabric of your daily life is knitted around your job. So, think about what you will lose and how it is likely to affect you."

High 5 Weekly Career Transitions Roundup: How to Deal with Failure & Avoid Blame

This is our weekly roundup of some of the best career-related articles, interviews, blogs, etc., we've read during the week. We share them so you have some great resources to prepare you for the coming week. Enjoy!

• How to Deal with Failure & Avoid Blame: "When you blame others, you prevent yourself from being able to do proper self-evaluation, which is critical to self-improvement. The leader who doesn’t blame others has his office in the solutions department, not the excuses department."

• The Right Way to Respond to Negative Feedback: "We can’t act on feedback until we truly understand it. Especially when we hear something new, it’s usually a good idea to ask a few trustworthy sources whether they’ve noticed the same behavior."

• 3 Signs Your Diet is Hurting Your Career: "You’re not able to be as present and engaged with your co-workers as you would be if your body were adequately nourished."

• 9 Simple Ways to Delegate Better: "It is time to begin delegating if you haven't started already, or refine how you delegate if you have, by following these steps."
• How to Stay Focused When You Have a Flexible Schedule: "Maintaining a daily routine helps us to establish a foundation that helps us achieve productive goals, like getting our work done or starting by a certain time."

Daily Leap Career Video of the Week: 14 Things Ridiculously Successful People Do Every Day

Each week we present our Daily Leap Career Video of the Week. The video we share presents news or advice related to career and life development, searching for a job, the economy and employment, and other career-related topics.

The video below from Entrepreneur identifies 14 practices that you can implement in your life that will lead to more success, such as focusing on one thing at a time or delegating almost everything. Watch the video for more great ideas:

Daily Leap Career Video of the Week: 8 Tips to Be More Efficient

Each week we present our Daily Leap Career Video of the Week. The video we share presents news or advice related to career and life development, searching for a job, the economy and employment, and other career-related topics.

The video below presents 8 tips to be more efficient with your time, starting with: stop multitasking. See more below:

Daily Leap Career Video of the Week: How to be a Leader

Each week we present our Daily Leap Career Video of the Week. The video we share presents news or advice related to career development, searching for a job, the economy and employment, and other career-related topics.

The Forbes video below identifies 4 essential tips to being a good leader, including trusting your team enough to delegate to them.

Delegating Effectively

Delegating in the workplace means sharing your workload and assigning work responsibility and/or tasks to co-workers. If you have a difficult time delegating, you’re not alone. However, if you avoid delegating, you might actually be doing a disservice to you and your employer.

Most employers would agree that your time and talents are best served working on important tasks and/or those for which you have a keen aptitude, knowledge, or experience. Therefore, if you target the right people and the right tasks, delegating makes good business sense.

Start by making a list of all the work you have to complete within a given time period. Begin with high-level responsibilities and tasks, and then drill down to the smaller tasks associated with each. Next, identify those smaller tasks that can be delegated, and determine which competent and reliable co-worker(s) can handle these tasks. Now you’re almost ready to start delegating the work, but before you do, consider the following advice:

Draw your manager in: Have a conversation with your manager about how involved he/she wants to be in delegating work to co-workers.
Delegate wisely: Be smart about what work you delegate and to whom.
Be respectful of your co-workers: Whether you’re delegating to a co-worker who is a subordinate, a peer, or a higher pay grade, be respectful and courteous in your approach. Even in cases where you have the authority to delegate tasks, be sensitive to the fact that everyone has their own work responsibilities and deadlines.
Communicate expectations and provide direction: Set and communicate realistic expectations. When necessary, provide specific directions on how to complete the task. Set deadlines and communicate necessary checkpoints and a timeline for those checkpoints.
Remember, you’re responsible: In most cases, you will be ultimately responsible for the work you delegate; therefore, it is in your best interest to help those you delegate to so they can be successful.
Evaluate success: You can measure your success at delegating by assessing the outcomes. Use criteria like whether the work was done well, on time, and within budget. If the work you’re delegating isn’t up to par, rethink whether you’re delegating the right tasks to the right people and whether you’ve communicated clear expectations and directions.