[UPDATE: Careerly's Best Apps for 2019 is now published and available for download here!!]
We get a significant number of requests from people asking us about productivity tools and the latest apps that help you manage your time, career, and life. We even recently did a Facebook Livestream on the topic and it led to a pretty lively discussion.
Now, you know Careerly is not big on control and mirco-management and tracking every blessed thing we do. There's enough of that already... the constant measuring of our value versus others' value on every metric from marathons run to promotions snagged to steps walked to avocados eaten to glasses of water drunk. Not sure we want to be adding to the angst here. But what about comparing with our own selves? Setting a goal and measuring simply your own progress on something that matters to you over a week, a month, or an year? Looking back at you 10 years ago or even 5 years ago and seeing how far you've come... that's cool, right?
Yes. With one caveat. Comparing - the act of camparing A to B, even if it's to our own performance from another time - is inherently an act of judgment. A is better than B. Or A is good and B is bad. We are trying to get from B to A, because we have deemed that B is unsatisfactory. So, every time you compare - your run today versus yesterday's, your job perforrmance this month versus last month's, and even your level serenity and happiness this year versus last year - you have to be preapred to accept that the move may not be in the direction you want.
So you cannot let that hurt or upset you! Compare all you want, as long as you keep moving forward. Or rest when you're tired or even give up altogether, dammit, for a while. Set goals, track results, and see how you're doing By all means, compare scores and delight in improving them. But do NOT ever feel bad, self-recriminate, or blame yourself (or others, or the world at large).
See, this is the reason we hesitate to write and publish a Guide that pushes productivity and doing more. Careerly's ethos has always been to discourage the often debilitating practice of more, more, more and constant striving and comparisons with peers.
But we can also see how our candidates genuinely suffer from legitimate distractions while simply trying to get through the priorities of the day. Like headless chicken they move rapidly from this thing to that thing, multi-tasking, while managing social media, messaging, texting, replying to every email hitting the inbox, and checking every single ping, beep, ring, and noise emating from their smartphone.
On the other side, we also see entrepreneurs and creative people committed to projects they deeply believe in and want to see their ideas take off the ground but struggle with the consistent level of productivity required to truly make those ideas work and have their contributions felt in this world.
So, we'll do the Guide, and I think our internal team will also learn a lot in testing out these various apps (there are literally hundreds of them!) before we present only the best ones to you.
With that, we are very happy to annouce that research is underway for a mega Careerly Work & Productivity Apps Guide to be realised in late March. Stay tuned and watch this space!
[[UPDATE: Careerly's Best Apps for 2019 is now published and available for download here!!]
