Manage yourself, manage your career

Managing employees can be challenging. Managing yourself can be even harder. But developing solid self-management skills can send your career hurtling into star territory. Concentrate on these:

• Focus. Learn your company’s goals, and then add your own value to attaining them.

• Time management. Review your efficiency, and devise ways to improve it. Try new work routines and habits to boost productivity.

• Copy. Borrow other people’s methods for self-improvement constantly and relentlessly.

• Planning. Plan your work, but also be ready for problems and interruptions. Build time into your schedule for problem solving so that you can avoid working in a crisis-fueled panic.

• Realistic outlook. Accept the occasional unproductive day, and even work slumps of a few weeks. You can’t work at 110 percent all the time, and criticizing yourself wastes precious energy.

• Work patterns. Some people work in great bursts and long hours. Others work in slow steady rhythms. Whatever yours is, know it and respect it.