This is a question cross-posted from the Effective Altruism Careers Discussion Facebook group.
“Do you know any techniques to avoid wasting too much time in the EA career search process? (I am currently at this stage, and I lose focus very easily, which makes me waste a lot of time). Thanks in advance!”
I first have a question in response: are you in job search or doing career work? This is the preliminary distinction I’ve made between knowing where you want to go and just needing help getting there (job search) and wanting to figure out in broader strokes where you want to go with your career, what cause is most important to you, what you are personally fit for, that sort of stuff (career work). My brief response below is for career work, but I would answer differently if the concern was more with the job search side.
Currently in the midst of this myself (so this is very much just something that helped me, not decided wisdom) but I spent way too long doing cause prioritization at the start. A little bit is helpful, and can be really good (developing a list of perhaps 6 areas you could go into) but beyond that, going more with gut and intuition would have saved me a lot of time, because I had a sense of which two areas I was most interested in from the start of that process, and then spent a couple of days trying to hone it more to only end back up where I started.