Saturday, January 25, 2014

"Multiple Use, Sustained Yield" for job seekers and students and organizationally challenged

"Multiple Use-Sustained Yield" ("MUSY")  is a term used in a 1960 federal law that is meant to guide the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture on how to use the renewable resources in national forests.  Applied to organization and career-searching, it's also a very useful shorthand for thinking about how to perform certain tasks in a way that will be immediately useful to people in more than one way AS WELL as having ongoing, varied benefits that can be later reaped from this original effort. 

For instance, let us say you want to make a list of places to apply for a job.  You could write these possible places down on a piece of paper, crossing them off as you sent emails to a general address or the HR department, and that would certainly be better than not having a list at all.   Or, you could put together a document or a spread-sheet with company names, individuals at those companies that you have had interaction with, links to online articles about the company (in order to personalize emails or letters with obvious knowledge of the company), email and other contact information, space to record when outreach was made and what the result was, a date to reach out to them again if the first effort was not fully fruitful, and other useful information.  This latter option would serve you well right away and allow you to efficiently reach out with targeted letters to various people in the company (this would be an example of "multiple use"), and it would also be something that serves you well when you reapply to a place that really interests you if the time was not right for a fit when you applied the first time (here is the "sustained yield").

Sure, making the more involved document will require more minutes of work and devotion, and some longer-range thinking.  However, the increased and prolonged usefulness you'll get from that time will almost certainly be worth the time, effort, and thought, and it will also develop a personal habit of doing an excellent job on a task that while mundane, is also important.  This habit will almost certainly stand one well in future endeavors, personally and at work.  It'll take more time, so make sure you account for this up-front need in your time management and personal schedule!

Studying for a test or reading a report at work and taking good notes by engaging in "active reading," where you stop after ever page and summarize the page/paragraphs and record any lingering questions or observations you might have before reading on, is another example of "MUSY." Contrast doing this with just reading the text, flipping page to page, and having nothing written when done.  Sound like something you'll be able to recall with ease and get a longer-term benefit from? Applying "active reading" is the sort of effort will help with real understanding and recall, let you have notes you can refer to now and in the future, be something you can share with other workers or classmates, and generally exhibit a meta-application of the accurate, if aged, adage that "If a task is worth doing, it is worth doing right."

Take some extra time and imagine what would be most useful now and in the future with regard to a task, plan out how to accomplish this approach, and schedule yourself enough time to do it well, and you'll have saved time in the long run and given yourself many more options with the information than doing it in just the quickest way possible.  Try it and see!

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