We’ve compressed the main advice in the series down to a 3-page summary: everything we’ve learned about career planning.

We recommend going through each article in order, and completing the exercises as you goThe most important sections are marked with a ★. You can save time by skipping or skimming the others.

Here are the two key things you need to do before reading the first article:

1. Create your own copy of the template so you can fill it out each week. We recommend using Google docs. Click here to get your copy.
2. Schedule in your calendar when you’ll do the exercises. A couple of hours each week is ideal, though feel free to spend more or less. Some parts are also faster than others.
   Other things to keep in mind:

* You might want to find a friend to work through the series with you. This makes you much more likely to finish, and it’s really useful to have someone to discuss your plans with. Plus, it’s more fun. If you know someone who might be interested, send them this page right now and ask them to sign up.
* Otherwise, jot down the names of 2–3 other people you might be able to discuss your plans with. An ideal workflow might be something like filling out each section of your worksheet on Sunday afternoons, discussing it with someone during the week, and then updating it based on what you learned the following Sunday, when you do the next week’s exercises.
* See an example template from a reader to see what it looks like filled out.
* You can also ask questions in our LinkedIn Group, as well as use it to find people in the fields you’d like to enter.
* There are many other ways to use the process. E.g. you might prefer to do a rough pass over everything in one weekend and then do some follow up research, or you might want to discuss it with a friend over dinner (or both). You can find all the sections online on this page, so you don’t have to follow the weekly cadence. You can also see a 3-page summary of all the main advice.
* Some of the questions in the process are difficult. You might find that there are no fully satisfactory answers. But best guesses (which can be revised over time) are much better than not thinking about these questions at all, so when in doubt just write something down.
* Approach your uncertainties like a scientist. Make some best-guess hypotheses about which options are best, identify key uncertainties, and then investigate them. Test out ideas empirically where you can. Don’t aim for certainty. In fact, you can think of much of your career as a series of experiments: You can try something for 6–24 months and then review your plan, improving your best guesses over time.
* We often ask you to think about things from several different angles. This is because much career planning is about finding a balance, like between shooting for what the world most needs and using your strengths, or between careful planning and opportunism. We’ll introduce several of these pairs to ensure you’ve considered everything.
* At 80,000 Hours, we focus on social impact — but you will have other goals. Although we try to provide space in the process for these other personal priorities, we’re not providing a complete picture of career planning — you’ll need to balance what we cover with your personal priorities.
* Seek support on the emotional aspects of changing your career. Your career may be a big part of your life and identity. The questions we pose might bring up fears about the future, insecurities, guilt about not doing more, or other worries. That’s okay and normal. However, the emotional side of career choice is not our expertise, so we’d encourage you to seek support on this from friends or others. That said, you might also find some of our tips on general self-development and happiness useful here.
* You can’t control the lot you’ve been given, and you can’t determine the results of your efforts. The best you can do is to spend time thinking about your strategy, work toward your best-guess goals, and improve over time. If you follow the steps in the process, then even if the results are not as hoped, or you don’t achieve as much as other people, you’re doing the best you can, which is all anyone can do.