Your Career Are You Spending More Time Planning Your Vacation

Developing the Next Generation of Rainmakers Your Career: Are you spending more time planning your vacation? It’s vacation season. Have you planned your vacation? Where do you want to be in your career five years from now? What is your plan to get there? What do you want to do during the last 6 months of 2015 to get a great start? When I was practicing law I frequently asked young lawyers those questions? If they didn’t have a really good answer, I would ask what they planned to do on vacation this year. Almost always I heard about a detailed plan on what sounded like a really great trip. Inevitably the lawyers knew where they wanted to go on vacation, why they wanted to go there, what they wanted to do each day there. Approach your career planning the same way. A few years ago I saw an HBR on line article:  A Better Way to Plan Your Career. I especially liked this concept: On the other hand, you can increase your probability of success by approaching your career with the right mind-setâ€"one that recognizes that career planning is a continuous process that has to be actively managed. At each step in your career, you need to ask yourself: What can I do next that will maximize my options in the future? So, what can you do the second half to 2015 that will maximize your options in the future? I practiced law for 37 years developing a national construction law practice representing some of the top highway and transportation construction contractors in the US.