The Sales Experiment

by Leave a Comment

How to Find Time for Your Most Important Practices

How to Find Time for Your Most Important Practices
Most important practices
Photo from http://startupstockphotos.com/

Like everybody else, I struggle with the tyranny of the urgent.

That’s why one of my biggest aims is to carve out time to attack the practices, disciplines, and tasks that will nearly never be urgent until it’s absolutely too late.

This includes adopting daily disciplines and giving priority during the day to Most Important Practices (MIPs).

But given the fact that most of us struggle with a nasty combination of overcommitment and procrastination, we have difficulty protecting dedicated time to engage our most important practices. We overcommit and then piddle until our only option is to tend to urgencies.

I go through seasons where I’m extremely disciplined about my practices like morning exercise, writing, prospecting for clients. And then I go through seasons where I feel a bit like a pinball bouncing from bumper to bumper.

When I’m doing well at creating time for my most important practices, here’s why:

  1. Start Small: I set a timer for 25 minutes and pick one practice. I commit to the 25 minutes, and then I let myself do all the urgent stuff.
  2. Do It First Thing in the Morning: I try to get one personal MIP done first thing after I wake up. When I get to work, I try to do one MIP first thing, before I open email – again only 25 minutes.
  3. Plan Early: Some days, the mornings just don’t work. If not, I’ll plan early and identify 25 minutes some time during the day where I can pull back. During lunch, prior to my commute home, as soon as the kids go to bed (in agreement with my wife). I set aside some moment to touch on at least one MIP.
  4. Be Flexible:  Have enough grace with yourself to only do 10 minutes of a practice if that’s all you have. Just make sure to do something.

Out of all these, my main suggestion is to have one clear practice in mind before the day starts and a set, short period of time set aside to do the practice.

It works. And any traction on these important, not urgent activities is good traction.

My challenge today: Get two practices in. I was able to write and get exercise. Yay me!

What works for you?

Listening and Reading for Today

How To Be Effective At Social Marketing Without Content Curation – Web Search Social Podcast with Carol Lynn Rivera 

Rivera makes a case against the 80-20 rule as many social media marketers have applied it to social media posts. Why do we have to spend so much time blasting everyone else’s stories but our own? Give the podcast a listen. Great stuff (and short – I’m starting to like short form podcasts).

Sales Hack: Salespeople help, salespeople – Sales Gravy Podcast with Jeb Blount

Blount offers up a great little hack. If you’re having a hard time getting through a gatekeeper, call back and ask for a member of the sales team. They can often help you navigate through the organization to your key contact.

DO WHAT YOU KNOW – North Point Community Church with Clay Scroggins

Scroggins’ sermon is all about the difference between knowing what to do and doing what you know. The challenge was simply this: choose one thing that you know you should do and do it. The sermon was a part of the series ‘Anything But Average‘. The previous sermons in the series were about learning to (a) Exceed Expectations and (b) Delay Gratification.  Great little series.

 

by Leave a Comment

Do the Little Things

On personality tests, I’m one of those guys who likes people and ideas and stuff like that.

That means I don’t like paperwork and processes and processes that involve paperwork. We feel that “I’s” should remain undotted and the only reason to cross “T’s” is to make sure nobody mistakes them for L’s or I’s.

But alas, as a professional services provider, the details are amazingly important. Without attending to the details, the strategic broad brush strokes become irrelevant.

Lack of execution renders brilliant ideation and good relationships useless (especially when we’re talking about delivering a service).

Today, I punted ideas and spent time focused on shoring up processes – doing the little things that, over time, will help deliver important results

While I know that it’s important to spend most of my time doing the things that leverage my strengths, but the details sill must get done.

Unless you are able to set up your organization to delegate all such things, you still will have to perform process-oriented tasks (although it’s a good idea to identify the things that you’d love to offload over time and do it as soon as possible).

My suggestions to tackle those tasks in a way to get ’em done without infringing too much on the time you want to dedicate to your more effective work:

  1. Batch Your Tasks: Do a bunch of the mundane things at one time. Just clench your teeth and push straight through them.
  2. Pomodoro Technique: Set a timer a couple times a day within which you will do process type tasks – respond to emails, note whatever CRM or other system that you have to keep notes in, make phone calls, and so forth.
  3. Save It Till the End of the Day: Get your thought work done early while you’re sharp. Knock out the

How about you? How do you get done the things that you have to do but feel like the conflict with your more effective work? Leave a comment below.

Today’s Listening and Reading: 

I listened to a few episodes of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch. I especially enjoyed his podcast with David Meerman Scott talking about the ‘new rules of selling’.  The men are pioneers in the inbound marketing world.

Until tomorrow…

——————————-

This blog is a response to Dan Miller’s unintentional challenge from his podcast on August 15, 2014: If you read or listen to 30 minutes of quality content a day, you’ll double your income. 

From September 1, 2014 through March 1, 2015, I will be doing the following:

  1. Listening or reading to 30 minutes of success, growth, business, spiritual, or other mindset-shifting, skill-sharpening content.
  2. Selecting one action item from that content (with some leeway to select an action from a previous day’s content).
  3. Doing that one action.
  4. Writing about the action or some other idea from the reading and listening of the day. 

 

Recent Posts