Dealing with 'busyness'

This post focuses on explaining what I have been doing in the meantime, how I deal with doing a lot of things simultaneously, and how I protect myself from burning out. This will be done chronologically from July till now. It also explains why I did not make time to blog and why now I do have time again.

The state of having or being involved in many activities ~ Definition of 'busyness' by the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

In the field of interdisciplinarity, there is a theory that says that there are three main capitals (read: forces) that drive development and status of a person, which are financial, cultural and social capital. In the first section I will describe my plans to improve my financial capital gain in the future, in the second I have described my cultural gain in knowledge to do what I want and in the third I will describe my focus on social gains.

Most people think that I love to do a lot of things simultaneously, and I have to be honest that I do certainly make it look like that. In reality, I just love having a ton of choices to make on a day. For example, this year I decided to take 50% more courses than the normal students (while doing a double Master specialisation), while also continuing my work as a student counselor, business developer and my hobbies. Many people would think that this would only wear me out more, or make me enjoy the time I have less. However, that was not true because I set it up in a way that I could literally choose what I wanted to work upon, making flexibility the most important value that I was pursuing in the last few months. It was also during these months that I realized the value of being free to do what you want. Although I would not go as far as to say that from now on I would like to start my own company to never be forced to do anything, I must admit that the period strongly reinforced my future plans. My plans are to seek out jobs that support a high-dynamic environment, while also supporting a lifestyle that suits someone that does not care putting in 50+ hours into the working field. This also means that for those 50+ hours, I want to be rewarded proportionally. This is why I additionally followed multiple courses on negotiation, market analysis and valuation. The main insight for me from these courses is that markets are like statistical normal distributions, and that one should treat it like such a distribution too. The more time you spend looking through the bulk of places, the more you will find outliers that work out positively for you due to disproportional reward-performance distribution.

There are even people that think that I am extroverted due to my public speaking skills. However, I am originally introverted and to be honest, I still relate more to introversion than extraversion. It is important to understand that the spectrum of introversion to extraversion contains different criteria, instead of simply depending on 'liking to talk to other people' and 'not liking to talk at all'. For me, it works as a threshold; people in need of my help activate my 'extrovert' side (read: raising my courage to talk to people that I barely know). I also do not mind presenting and public speaking at all, in contrast to many people, extroverts and introverts included. However, something I barely (to never) enjoy is exhaustive and extensive small talk. Although I realize the potential for bonding and building rapport, I genuinely prefer working on something or someone. This is simply because of my personality, as I strongly prefer having a shared goal and working towards such goals. I love performing in any way possible and see the progress I make. What I enjoy even more is seeing the progress that others make, hence why my dream still remains to enhance self-knowledge in individuals that are too demotivated at this point in life. This relates to my previous post about decision-making, in which I strongly elaborated on following your ambition as a guideline in life. To work on the enhancement of self-knowledge, I developed my first ever quadrant for self-development in which I focus on career opportunities and exploitation. In the meantime I also helped multiple university-graduates get into high-end law firms to expand my target group, regarding the student population.

Obviously social development during COVID-19 could be deemed hard, but I actually managed to get through it quite nicely. I managed to make a lot of friends as many of the people you encounter also are in the same situation, therefore you have common ground to explore. This was how I expanded my 'emotional' network (read: different level of friends). During the lectures that I attended for financial development, they also emphasized the importance of a big network, despite being meaningful or not. Meaningful connections are characterized by those that would be ready to do something for you, whereas not meaningful connections are people you just happen to have made a connection with. The thought behind expanding your network despite meaningfulness is that it allows to market yourself. One should compare the process of networking to the start-up of a YouTube channel, implying that quantity should be prioritized over quality in the first place. This might sound weird for those always learning to put quality over quantity, but the main reason for this is that intially you are building up a platform. This especially works for LinkedIn and the idea behind this is that once you have enough following, the algorithm will work in your favor. This happens in multiple ways, but I personally think the most beneficial consequence is better post visibility due to being a high-value member and due to people liking your post, leading to more people you do not know that see your content.

A person with 200 followers liking your post, could potentially mean an additional 199 unknown people seeing your post. So suppose you built up your network to 300 people and those had 200 connections on average. If just 50 connections liked your post, a potential 10.000 people will see your post.

So, in order to expand my own social capital, I tried to increase my connections on LinkedIn and improve my SEO on Google (read: search engine optimization). Early 2021 I started with a total of 213 connections and my goal was to end with 500+ connections at the end of the year, just by scrolling through the network section on LinkedIn twice a week. In addition, I also created this website, upgraded my LinkedIn, learned about Google's algorithm in their free course, updated my YouTube channel (although I did not do anything with this yet) and focused strongly on personal branding and neuroeconomics. I was very happy to see that at the end of the year, I surpassed the threshold of 500 and even reached a total of 811 connections. In addition, I also managed to make at least 70% of my surname search results about me, which first was only 30%. The blog subscriptions also increased from just three to more than 10. Lastly, I also managed to register one article on a professional research-website. All in all, I increased my public exposure and also expanded my network online, yet also offline with deep connections during studying.

So where does that leave me now? Shortly summarized, I basically gained knowledge on valuing myself and improving my position on the job market, while also realizing the importance of flexibility. I improved my social capital through search engine optimization and network expansion. Finally, I improved my cultural capital through expanding my knowledge on coaching and also expanding my target group and tools to coach. This year my goals will be to get my first publication out there; in addition, I will start an internship and enter the official job market. This is why I will focus on overdelivering in the internship and secure a disproportional reward-performance starting job within the field of projectmanagement or consultancy within a highly-dynamic field. In the near future I will also experiment with making videos, video-editing and increasing video-based exposure. As for the distant future, all of my contributions focus on building a platform (by building recognition through various social media platforms and SEO) and expanding my skills to an extent that I can be an all-rounder in almost all fields that there are (on a consultancy level). I believe that for my ambition of getting the best out of people, I should also know what possibilities there are for people and I believe the best way to do so, is engulfing myself within as many fields as possible.

I will also try to find a shorter more consistent format to post on this website for increasing online exposure. I do enjoy writing, however, I would like to write about more while being more consistent. This basically translates into me making writing a low-time habit, meaning that I will need to reduce the time spent on the articles while writing more. At the moment I do not really have an idea how to do so (let me know if you have any suggestions!). Let me know more about what you think of this writing style or format. I'd love to know! I hope that the blog was enjoyable and that I will find a new format for the next one. I am looking forward to write the next one! :)

Take care and have a nice day!