How to refresh your PM career in under one-hour?

1. Go for A Long Walk to A New Area (30-60 minutes)

New settings have a tremendous impact, as you learnet in the PMP prep course. Many individuals believe that in order to learn something new, they must board an aircraft and travel to a different nation. Traveling internationally is wonderful, but don't limit yourself to it. After all, you may be working with a limited budget and vacation days.

Put on your sneakers and go for a walk in a new part of town this week. You can look for a park that you haven't visited before. Alternatively, you can go exploring in residential areas that you normally pass by on your daily commute.

Going for a lengthy stroll has two career advantages. First, you receive some much-needed exercise, which is a simple approach to keep your health in check. Second, your obsession with career issues lessens as you go across different areas. You might even acquire new ideas for your project from time to time (or the next chapter of your career).

1. Write a Fifteen Minute Report on Fridays for A Month (15 minutes per week).

Have you ever felt like a workweek has passed you by and you're not sure what you accomplished? This sentiment is natural given the frequent crisis management and project stress. There is, thankfully, an easy technique to cut through the fog.

Write a short text document titled "Weekly Report" on Friday. There are only a few parts to this brief document. Allow yourself no more than 15 minutes to complete it.

• Section 1: What I Accomplished This Week (suggest 2-4 items)
• Section 2: What I Learned This Week (2-4 items; can be books, websites, new software, etc)
• Section 3: Plans for Next Week (focus on the 3-5 most important items)

For more than six months, I used the fifteen-minute report technique. It made a significant difference in assisting me in realizing how much I accomplished at work.

1. Contact an Old Manager to Catch Up (10 minutes)

When was the last time you spoke with a former boss? It's possible that it's the person who recruited you for your first full-time job. It could also be someone from your current firm who is newer. It's easy to lose touch with people when project managers move around a lot (especially those who work on a consulting basis).

To reconnect with an old manager, hunt them up on LinkedIn.com and write them a short note, as taught in the PMP prep course. Write a few phrases about what you're up to and inquire about it. If you don't get a response after a week, send another message. You could decide to go out to lunch and continue the chat.

1. Write A Process Improvement Note (30 minutes)

Project managers must be able to recognize opportunities. Your capacity to perceive opportunities may deteriorate if you are solely focused on project completion. It doesn't have to be that way, thankfully!

Consider your previous two projects for a moment. On both projects, what procedures did you have to follow? Have you had a lot of papers to finish? Reducing paperwork complexity is a great approach to boost productivity.

Write down 10 suggestions for how to improve your company's operations over the course of 30 minutes. It is critical to write down your thoughts. You'll be ready to give ideas quickly if you have one page of process improvement ideas on hand the next time someone comments, "This procedure is terrible!"

These four suggestions will significantly improve the quality of your project management profession. Best of all, none of these suggestions require any money or software to implement.

Need more insights on the same? Enroll in the project management professional certification training program today!

Richard Pierce An expert in Pmi and Iiba Certifications.