time management Archives - The Sales Experiment

July 6, 2015 by Brett Leave a Comment

I Must Be Ruthless about My Time

One of productivity’s biggest killers is our tendency to allow other people’s priorities to determine our schedules.

We become ineffective if we do not filter every opportunity or task through the lens of our personal and work priorities.

We must be ruthless about our time. It is the most precious non-human resource we have at our disposal. The way we use our time predicts our relationships, our work outcomes, and our health.

When we allow others’ opinions about what we should be doing at a particular moment, we give up our overall effectiveness.

Will we please a particular person at a particular moment? Maybe.

Will we be rewarding their bad behavior so they will continue to butt in on our days with a sense of entitlement to our immediate jumping when they request we jump? Most definitely.

It’s a Balancing Act

If you’re reading this, then you are probably in sales or marketing and you are responsible to clients, managers, and other stakeholders.

Consequently, you must balance others’ very real needs of your time and effort with your commitment to producing long-lasting results.

The question is how to do this. How do you make sure to enter info into your customer relationship management software while still taking time to prospect into new opportunities while quarterbacking a servicing need for an existing client? Two of which always seem urgent (guess which one always gets put on the back burner).

Keeping all of these priorities (because they are all things that need to get done) is a skill that can be developed through developing some key habits.

Practices to Help You Develop Time Management Ruthlessness

We are all different, so I will not be prescriptive here. As a matter of fact, I continually play with different practices and habits to help me win in this area. I struggle with people pleasing in the worst way and find I must be vigilant about my tendencies to “Yes” myself to death.

What follows are mindset shifts and tactical practices to help.

Mindset Shifts

Be Intentional: Most of us live in our inboxes. And we feel busy. Inbox triage all day long is the opposite of intentionality. Develop an intentional mindset. When you do something, ask yourself if it serves your key responsibility areas, your primary goals, and your ultimate personal priorities.
Be Willing to Say No: You must be willing to say “No” or “Net yet” or “I’m not the best one to do that for you.” We can’t usually disregard a request completely, but we can put it in its proper place on our calendar or delegate it to the best priority.
Be Selfish: Learn to take the first few hours of the day to plow through your main priorities and tasks. Don’t feel bad about waiting until 10am or 11am before bouncing around like a pinball according to others’ priorities. Treat your first couple hours as if you had a client meeting. And your client is yourself.

Tactical Practices

Time-blocking: Duh. But do you do it? This fits hand in glove with being intentional. Determine the best days and times of the week for certain important but not urgent tasks. Block time for making prospecting calls. Block time for creative work. Block time for strategic planning. Treat these times as appointments and meetings. There’s nothing that someone needs from you at 9am, that they can’t wait for until 10am or 11am.
Process Creation: Identify where your work can be broken down into processes. Codify those processes. Inform others. Creating processes does two things: (1) It helps you create a habit around a task so you don’t need to think about it every time, and (2) it gives you an easier way to say “No” or delegate or put a false-urgent into the calendar because you have a “proven process” to handle such requests.
Email Avoidance: Many people balk at this one. Just try it. Turn off your automatic send/receive for at least 30 minutes two times a day (and expand as you can). You can still send emails or review any relevant emails for a project you are working on. Most email clients allow you to send manually without receiving messages.

How Do You Protect Your Time?

Let me know in the comments. The six items above are quite general and basic, so I’d love to hear how you specifically ward off time thieves.

October 27, 2014 by Brett 2 Comments

TED, Tucking Kids in, and Time Management

While I’m under no illusion that folks are paying close attention to this blog and my commitment to read or listen to content everyday, act on it, and write about it, I’m personally aware that I made the commitment.

I’ve found it more difficult than first imagined to make good on the writing portion of this commitment. Perhaps I should save the previous day’s activity for the next day’s writing so I can knock it out first thing in the morning.

Right now, I’m planning for a speaking engagement (the result of a commitment earlier in this Dan Miller Challenge process) and, quite frankly, it’s kicking my butt. I’ve had to prioritize that preparation because there will be very real, flesh and bone people for whom I hope to create true value. Prayers appreciated.

I don’t want to get too far afield from this challenge to keeping record on this site. This post is more self-serving than I’d like it to be, but maybe you can find a nugget or two.

TED Talks

In an effort to get a feel for well-done speeches, I power listened to and watched TED talks on YouTube all day on Saturday (two days ago). I was working on home projects, letting the YouTube channel go all day. Great stuff, although I think there’s an over-gravitas-ness of the talks at times. I’m not one to criticize, but a joke or a little levity here and there would be nice.

Tucking My Children In

Yesterday, I listened to a sermon about manhood – what it means to be a man, from a biblical worldview. Matt Chandler of Village Church in Dallas, TX encouraged men that regardless of how worn out, tired, or ‘over it’ we get, that comfort is always our enemy. Getting home from work and never moving butt from couch is a sure way to slowly bring a family into dysfunction.

Not only that, but a man is called to make sure he takes time with his children and wife, to tuck them in, to sit and ask them about their day and pray or sing with them. So… I made sure to take over tucking in duties. Even if we share it, I want to be there for my daughter and my boys, every night to give them hugs and sing them a song if they want it and to dig a bit into their little hearts.

Time Management

On the way to work, I caught a couple Ben Settle Antipreneur podcasts on time management. One of the key takeaways: pay yourself first as it relates to time. So today, I did. I worked on my upcoming talk for the first two hours before the day went haywire with other demands. It helped set the day up to be much more productive.

In Conclusion…

Even if you’re super-busy, try to find crevices of time where you can feed your mind, heart, and spirit with quality content. Pull away early in the morning. Take a walk and listen to something. Stop for 15 minutes and read a book.

Just a suggestion.

Until tomorrow…

October 22, 2014 by Brett Leave a Comment

How to Find Time for Your Most Important Practices

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:

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.
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.
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.
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.