Well, what you need my friend is “essential slacking”. I can imagine people having really bad images of slackers – they imagine someone in a messy office drinking soda while playing solitaire on the computer, or girls in the café downstairs, chatting about personal issues. That’s not what I mean, although actually maybe a bit of it too. We get so much caught in the daily routines and in perfecting our moves that we often forget about the big picture, we may forget the real goal, we may become isolated work bees without creativity, and innovation may seem as something only the scientists and researchers can do.

What I mean by essential slacking is a deliberate pause in your routine. Notice yourself spinning the wheel, working hard, multitasking… and stop. Just sit for a while, walk around, talk to someone, do whatever it takes to take you out of your routine. And then imagine your work from the higher perspective. Remind yourself what you are doing, why you are doing it, what is the whole purpose. Imagine what you would do if you had only 2 hours to finish what you are working on, instead of a week. Forget about the process and think about the goal. Maybe you will all of the sudden remember a person who has some expertise you may use instead of doing everything all by yourself. Can you team up? Maybe you will stop fretting about the colors or fonts. Is there a simpler way to do this? And maybe you will just focus on the most important parts and streamline your original plan into something short and crisp. What is really necessary and why?

Getting into essential slacking is difficult at first. Whenever you are deeply into something, you feel the rush and working on a task may give you a great feeling of self worth. It’ll feel uncomfortable to just stop. You may fear that if you stop now, you’ll lose the momentum, you’ll get distracted, and you’ll lose the thought. Come on! Have a little trust in your ability to go back to whatever you are doing after some time. And risk a little too. Maybe you’ll forget an idea that you have right now. But with essential slacking, you may come up with even better ideas, that will actually save you time and create a bigger impact.

Essential slacking allows you to stop and rethink your approach. There will always be more work than we can do. But the point is not to work the hardest. Let‘s face it, what is behind being successful in anything what people do? It is getting the right things done. And essential slacking will prevent you from losing yourself in your own world, from getting blind to the reality and from wasting time on trying to spin your wheel faster and faster.

Let’s take a closer look at this scenario. It seems like you want to have a stable job, not to worry about it too much, somehow go through your work days and focus more on what’s happening in your life after you come home from work. If this is true, then I guess we can say that that’s your intention, desire, goal, or whatever you want to call it. Now, how will you make sure you can really get that job and keep it? I don’t think you want to refresh you resumes all the time and move around a lot. You want to get something that fits your skills, is kind of easy to do, pays OK, and then you want to keep that job, correct? You want to prevent being told one day that they don’t need you anymore, because you are not fast, up to date, efficient, creative… enough?

Career doesn’t necessarily mean climbing the corporate ladder, or switching jobs to gain variety of experiences. It varies for each of us based on what our intentions are.

So, if your intention is to keep your job, then it’s in your best interest to at least keep your eyes open at what’s happening with the business you are in. Be aware of how it’s evolving as you are punching your hours over the days, weeks, and months. If you want to feel like your job is stable, so you can focus more on those other things in your life, you must at least be alert and flexible. And guess what? If you are doing that, you are definitely building a career, your career.

1. Surprise. Isn’t this an obvious goal of everybody joining a company? How can anyone ask “Why?”

2. Worry. They mentioned money, power, but then they got nervous. They struggled to come up with the reasons why this was something they really, really wanted to achieve. They were taught their whole life that the right thing to do is to shoot for the stars, so they did, never really questioning it.

It’s important to think really hard why we want what we want. You may say that you would like to be a CEO, because you want to have enough money to ensure that your family doesn’t ever need to worry about paying bills. But, what is “enough money”? By the way, not all wealthy people are CEOs, so there may be many different ways to get where you want be and maybe you are limiting your options by dreaming about becoming a CEO one day. Another reason I’ve heard was that people want to have a position where their opinions are taken seriously. But isn’t it kind of backwards? You will most likely have to have many great ideas and be influential in the first place to get up there.

By the way, when we dream of something, we tend to see only the glamour – as a CEO, I can imagine myself giving a powerful speech in front of my 10,000 enthusiastically clapping employees, or I can imagine driving a luxury car… But what about the downside of being a CEO? I wonder if any of those college graduates thought of how they would blend a family life with having a highly stressful position like that, or if they would like the frequent business trips or being criticized by media for their decisions.

Anyway, whether you are a college graduate or have 20+ years of career on your shoulders, I encourage you to ask yourself “What do I want to be when I grow up?” And then keep asking “Why?” You may realize that your reasons or motives can be only kind of sort of related to the job you envisioned for yourself and you may open up to new possibilities that would bring you the same outcome.

What if you are a school teacher and you’d like to grow into a people development specialist? Can your company, in this case the school, help you get there? Or, imagine that a company hired you as a localization project manager and you’d like to one day become a marketing consultant? You may think these are rather strange examples. Believe me, they are real examples. Actually these are about me and my husband. And I have many more when I talk to my friends and family. For example one is about a software engineer dreaming about becoming a movie music writer. The career development discussions, tools, opportunities that are available to you where you currently are may help you a little, but it’s very likely that they will not make your dream come true.

I remember taking to my manager about what kind of work I’d like to do. She listened, and then asked me “OK, so what job title are you talking about here?” As many in her position, she was trying to fit my dream into the company’s structure. Into the current company structure, to be precise. She didn’t even consider that maybe I’m talking about something new that may not exist, but that I can create if there is a need. Have you heard 10 years ago about a “social media specialist” position? Yet, it exists today.

So, what’s the point? Have all those career development talks with whoever is interested to talk to you about your career and your future. Use all the tools that make you think about possibilities, your passions, interests that you’ve never considered. But don’t be constrained by what a company you are in has to offer.

Now, the dictionary tells you, that career has something to do with a life-long or a long term activity. We are talking about how you are willing to spend your life. And I’m sure you don’t want to feel like the life has just kind of happened. I’m sure you’ve heard the saying “Career is what happens while we are making other plans”. We like being in control of our life and being able to decide how we spend our years. I’m sure you don’t want your career to just “happen”. In order to get what we want, we first need to know what it is that we want and then try to get it. And that’s what I call an intention. If you don’t want to wake up one day and wonder why you are who you are and why you spend your days doing something you would never pick for yourself, then you have to have a vision, and you have to intentionally make your strategy to get to what you want.

Intentional Career is about living your career day by day the way that has a meaning for you, a purpose. It’s not about dreaming that one day at some point in the future you’ll do what you always wanted to do. It’s about doing things every day the way that makes sense for you. That you can feel your career is happening each day. That you are making it happen, that it’s deliberate. That’s Intentional Career.