i feel i am overloaded with work and yet my career is not growing

Sometimes, our brain gets confused AF, it wonders, each passing day, despite doing a sh**t ton of work; Why do I still feel like the saddest guinea pig on earth? Why is it that everything I do is going in a circle?

Why do I feel like my self-growth is getting sucked down the toilet drain?

Nothing is MOVING…

You’ve seen that motivational image right? Where they show this guy digging for the diamond but just when he was just about to find it, he quits! 

You know what, fu*k that sh*t! It just shows you one side of the story.

He could have kept digging, found nothing, and would have died.
For what? Nothing!?

Everyone has a saturation point when they feel like ‘Nothing is MOVING’, there is no debate about that, but is there anything we can learn from this guy about what he was doing wrong? 

Was there anything he could have done to change his state of mind? 

When it comes to real-life scenarios, the way out of this is pretty simple and straight forward.

You need to be extremely selfish for a moment and think. Out of all the task I am doing right now, which projects would look good on my resume when I apply for my next job?

Is there anything new project I could experiment with?

Am I doing the same task each day which is leading me to learn nothing new?

When you ask these kinds of questions, you will know what are the important projects you need to focus on and where not to.

Once you have the list of projects you want to do the second step is to map these with what the company wants. 

Now to do this process I have come up with a grid inspired from a very popular book known as ‘7 Habits of Highly effective people’.

Now the grid looks like the below image, but I have modified it based on what works out for me.

Source: Wikipedia

Its called the Resume vs Visibility grid, this will be your compass to grow yourself in the company.

The way I personally do this is by listing down all the major projects I have been working on in the past couple of weeks on a sheet of paper.

Once I have this list I start classifying them based on ‘what’s good for my resume’ vs ‘what will give me visibility in the company’.

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And by visibility, I mean getting noticed by your Manager or your Manager’s Manager or someone relatively important in the organization.

Below is the sample grid to help you understand better.

(This is the best drawing I can come up with on google docs, please bear with me 😀 )

The objective is to focus on the 1st and 2nd grid as much as possible, with of course more focus on grid 2 – which gives you more visibility and learning.

With this approach, you should be more clear about what you have to do and why you have to do it. And when you are clear about your day to day moves, perosnal growth will never be something you will question again .

All you need to do is rinse and repeat this process whenever you feel like ‘Nothing is MOVING…’

The only thing to keep in mind is that you should always list down the PROJECTS you have been working on and not the ‘TASKS’! A list which has something like ‘Taking printouts daily for George’ is not gonna help anyone. LIST DOWN ONLY PROJECT NAMES!

Here is a sample of how I apply this on my work life when I am stuck, I just made it a week back, so yeah it’s pretty fresh 🙂

Once you have this grid ready, you can make sure all your day to day task are more aligned towards grid 1 and 2.

So yeah, that’s pretty much what I wanted to share with you, I have been thriving on this for almost a year now and it works like a charm.

Try implementing it and let me know how it works out for you.