If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

You have probably heard the expression, “It’s not what you know, but who you know.” And this quote is quite true when it comes to the world of business. In business, however, it is less “who you know” and more “who knows you.” Maybe you have been wondering lately why you are not getting the raises and promotions you feel you have earned; well, it might just be because the right people do not “know” you. If you want the right people to start to take notice of you, the first thing you need to learn is how to stand out at your job.

Standing out at your job is more than just drawing attention to yourself. After all, a lot of forms of attention are nothing but negative attention, which will certainly not help you to get that raise or promotion. Instead, you need to know how to draw positive attention to yourself.

One of the biggest ways you can draw positive attention to yourself is by silently doing more than what is expected of you. By doing more than what is expected of you, you are sure to get people to notice. And when you are doing it silently, just going about your business and not calling for people to notice, people will not just take notice, but they will take positive notice! Maybe you are on a project team; if you are, it should be your silent goal to do more work than anyone else on your team. If you boss asked you to return a report to him, you should research more thoroughly and make it more polished than he could have expected.

You can also draw positive attention to yourself by always being at work early, and by always staying late. On the surface, you might think that this would really dig into the other aspects of your life, but actually, people will take notice even if you are just fifteen minutes early every day, and if you leave just fifteen minutes late every day as well. Furthermore, you can probably find thirty “wasted” minutes somewhere else in your day! Cut this time out, and use it to draw positive attention to yourself.

Is is very easy to get ahead at your job. Do good work – that is all you have to do; good work, and in such a way that the attention it draws your way is positive attention.

Regardless of whether you are a high school student, a college student, or a full-time employee at a desk job, one of the most difficult things can be working on a long-term project that requires a lot of work, as it can make it difficult to complete a project when you are unable to see your progress. It can feel like a project is never going to end when you are working on it over an extended period; one way to counteract this feeling is by keeping track of your progress as you make your way through a project.

The first thing you need to do in order to track your progress throughout the duration of a project is to devise a step-by-step plan of how you will approach the project; this will give you a framework from which you can work, figuring out how much work you need to do at each point in time.

You can fill in notes regarding your work on each section of the project as you begin to make your way through it; not only will these notes help you see how far along in the project you have come, but they will also give you a detailed breakdown of how much work you have done.

You can “mark each section off your list” as you complete each section, which will allow you see how many sections you started out with and how many you still have left to complete.

When it comes to long-term projects, discipline will, of course, be a very important aspect, as you can come up with all the “plans” and “charts” you want, but this will mean nothing if you are not maintaining discipline to work on the project as time passes. As long as you are able to focus on a long-term project from an early point – keeping track of your progress as you make your way through it - you should easily be able to complete any project in a timely manner, with minimal stress!