Engineers: Are You Holding Yourself Accountable in Your Career?
My wife and I had a dinner party this past weekend and it made me realize once again how important accountability is in achieving your goals. In the weeks leading up to the dinner party my wife and I did so many things around the house that we have been wanting to do for years like spackling, painting, buying new lamps, curtains, and rugs. It’s amazing how many things you can actually get done when you give yourself a deadline to meet.
This is something that professionals just don’t do enough in their career. For example it’s amazing how many professionals procrastinate in registering for professional exams (i.e. the P.E. exam), but once they do, they study like crazy to pass the exam. It’s unfortunate, but sometimes we need the urgency of deadlines to move forward. How about creating accountability for yourself in other areas of your career such as achieving a certain position in your company or achieving a certain salary? Successful professionals regularly implement deadlines into their routine to hold themselves accountable.
Here are some strategies that you can use to start holding yourself accountable:
1. Tell other people (co-workers, supervisors and clients) what you plan on doing in your career. For example, tell your boss that you are currently studying for the P.E. exam, which you will take in April. By doing this, you are committing to someone other than yourself, which will introduce accountability and prompt you to work harder to achieve your goal. It’s one thing to let yourself down, but we tend to be much more fearful of letting others down.
2. Schedule action items on your calendar even if they are not physical meetings. Many professionals don’t like to add items to their calendar other than meetings. My calendar is filled with deadlines for tasks or goals that I want to achieve. This helps to hold you accountable by creating that urgency that I mentioned above. It also allows you to work efficiently because you can see, based on the other items on your calendar, how much time you can spend on each task or goal.
3. Write down all of the things that may happen if you meet your deadline and all of the things that may or may not happen if you don’t. You can use this list as motivation in meeting your deadlines, as we all know sometimes self-imposed deadlines don’t feel as urgent as deadlines such as exam dates.
I hope this post will inspire you to start being more accountable in your career and ultimately help you to achieve your goals, sooner rather than later!
Please share some of the ways you have held yourself accountable in your career…
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This is a guest post from Anthony Fasano, PE, author of Engineer Your Own Success. Anthony found success as an engineer at a very early age and now writes and podcasts to help other engineers do the same. Visit Anthony’s website at EngineeringCareerCoach.com and subscribe to the top 3 resources Anthony has used to become a partner in a firm at the age of 27.
