Stuck in your career? You don’t need more information, you need more action

Sarah Doody [00:00:00]: Hey there. I’m Sarah Doody, host of the Career Strategy Podcast. Many professionals are seeking more impact, flexibility, growth, and let’s face it, getting paid what they’re worth. But how do you unlock this in your career? It starts with strategy. I’m taking you behind the scenes of what’s working for my career coaching clients. You’ll hear strategies news and actionable, yet sometimes against the grain, advice for how you can be the CEO of your career and stop in Mondays. Ready to level up your career? Let’s get after it. Welcome back to another episode of the Career Strategy Podcast.

Sarah Doody [00:00:43]: And today, I wanna talk to you about the idea that perhaps in your career right now. What you don’t need is more and more and more information. What maybe you need is actually just more action. So one of the things I’ve noticed in my own career And through working with many people advancing their careers regardless of what stage they’re at is that at some point, We have to just stop seeking out more information and start focusing on taking action. It’s So easy to kind of delay or procrastinate taking action by doing another Google search, trying to find yet another opinion on something, but oftentimes, this seeking out of more information is just preventing you and feeding into this procrastination that many of us and myself included struggle with. So I wanna help you understand maybe some of the problems that consuming more and more and more information can have, and maybe you can relate to some of these. So first of all, Consuming more and seeking out more information often leads to contradicting advice and opinions. Right? And then you’re wondering, Well, what do I even believe? Which leads to confusion.

Sarah Doody [00:02:16]: Right? Which leads to then overwhelm and frustration, and then You’re kinda left with decision fatigue because you’re trying to decide whose advice and information should you believe and so much more. And for some of us, it leads to decision paralysis too where we just end up doing nothing. And I don’t want you to do nothing. I want you to be an action taker. So seeking out more and more information is really something that I refer to as an FSP activity. Now FSP stands for False sense of progress, FSP. And it’s really this activity that makes us feel like we are making progress, but we’re actually not because we’re not taking action. And, obviously, action does not always equal progress.

Sarah Doody [00:03:12]: Sometimes progress means we need to be consuming information to learn something. But many, many, many, many of us Revert to just collecting more and more information instead of taking action. And I think this is because Taking action, it’s hard. Right? It requires mental effort and energy. It’s time consuming. Writing your resume, updating your LinkedIn, applying to jobs, that is not an easy task. Right? Sometimes taking action means we are Putting ourself in a vulnerable place. Right? We are putting ourselves out there by applying to jobs or updating our LinkedIn or updating our resume, and it can be a little scary.

Sarah Doody [00:04:02]: Totally want to acknowledge that. But Here’s the thing. Right? If you tracked for maybe a week or even, honestly, a day, how much time you spend on FSP, false sense of progress activities. I think you would probably be really blown away with how much time you’re spending on these things, and that’s time you could be using. Not just time. It’s time and energy you could be using to taking action. I also want you to really try and get into the habit of noticing which activities you engage in to procrastinate taking action, and to help you Be more productive. I wanna recommend a tool.

Sarah Doody [00:04:51]: This is not sponsored. I just personally love this tool. It’s called get Flow. And you can find it at flowapp.info. So fl0winfo. We will link it in the show notes. This is a productivity timer, and you can use it on your desktop, so your laptop, your computer. And it just shows you a short timer.

Sarah Doody [00:05:16]: You can set it forever you want. I generally set it for a 25 minute work burst, but it really serves as a form of accountability, which helps me focus on activities that actually matter and not FSP type activities. And the last tip I wanna leave you with is at the end of each day, Take 5 or 10 minutes to start planning what action you need to do the next day. And by doing this the day before or the evening before. You are a little bit more clear headed, and you reduce the risk that doing that in the morning, you might be distracted by things that come into your email inbox or an Instagram post or a LinkedIn post that you read. Right? Some other things that could keep you distracted. So try making your to do list the night before, and you might find that you’re able to be more productive the next morning rather than needing to spend, you know, a couple of minutes or Hour in the morning figuring out what should I do today. Right? Alright.

Sarah Doody [00:06:26]: So I hope this gives you some really practical tips on how to be an action taker and really cautiously find the balance between information and action. Because if you really think about this and evaluate your own activities, I think you’re gonna realize You don’t need more information. What you need to do is to develop strategies and habits that help you become an action taker. Alright. I hope this was helpful. I hope it gives you some ideas and things to think about related to how you approach your career on development, and I will see you in the next episode. Talk to you later. Thanks for listening to the Career Strategy Podcast.

Sarah Doody [00:07:13]: Make sure to follow me, Sarah Doody, on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or LinkedIn. If anything in today’s episode resonated with you. I’d love to hear about it. Tag me on social media or send me a DM. And lastly, if you found this episode helpful, I’d really appreciate If you could share it with a friend or give us a quick rating on Spotify or review on Apple Podcasts.