Time Management and Technology
To many people, time management means segmenting their lives (especially their work lives) into little boxes, with each box representing a certain number of minutes or hours. To me, time management means putting things in perspective. Think about the 4.5 billion years Earth has been in existence. Think about the 70-plus years the average person spends on Earth. Put into that perspective, we are here on Earth for the blink of an eye. We have much to accomplish in such a brief time.
Time management is learning to appreciate the value of every moment you have on Earth. Not every moment will be earth-shattering. There will be moments of excitement, moments of success, moments of failure, and moments of introspection. But no moment should go to waste. You can’t plan every moment of your life (or your reps’ lives), but you can look at how you and your team spend your moments and think about whether or not you are spending your time wisely—and if not, find ways to make necessary changes.
The Time Management Test
There’s an old saying that goes, “It’s not how hard you work, it’s how smart you work.” Although we’d like to think otherwise, hard work alone doesn’t guarantee success. There are many people who work hard all their lives and don’t achieve success. Working smart is the ability to make sure that while you work hard, you use the most productive means possible to get the job accomplished. It’s the ability to do a task, evaluate it, and see how that task can be done better the next time. It’s discovering how you can become more efficient each time you do something. It’s understanding what your strengths are, and building on them. It’s learning from every action you take and converting that knowledge into the ability to make a better decision the next time.
The best way for your reps to work smarter is to manage their time so that they know what kinds of tasks they have to accomplish, and the best times to accomplish them. That often means dividing their time into face-to-face (or voice-to-voice) sales time, and non-selling activity time.
There’s an exercise I use in my sales management training seminar, designed for managers to give to their whole team, called the “Time Management Test.” It’s really very simple. Give your reps these directions: Starting on Monday, keep a journal of what you’re doing every hour that you’re working. If you start at 9:00, stop work at 9:55 and record what your last hour’s activity has been. Do the same thing at the end of each hour throughout the day. On Friday, compare that week’s activity and productivity to the week before.
I guarantee your reps will have accomplished more during their journal-keeping week than they ever have before.
Why? Because they had to think about everything they did. They were forced to think about the hour they just spent and how they could have improved it, and the hour to come and how they were going to spend it. It’s proactive thinking about how they can work more efficiently, whether that means increasing their time in front of customers or on the phone, changing the time of day during which they do paperwork, or changing their driving route so that they spend less time on the road. Your reps automatically start allocating their time more wisely.
This test is all about the ability to look at the big picture and take the time to think about what you can do to work smarter. Sometimes that’s all it takes—not making giant changes, but taking the time to think about what you’re doing and what small changes you can make to improve your overall efficiency.
“You will never find time for anything. If you want time, you must make it.”
Five Best Ways to Manage Your Time (and Your Reps’ Time)
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Emphasize balance. Obviously, your job is to keep everyone efficient and productive at work. Just remember that work is not everything. When the pressure at work is at its worst, people tend to neglect other areas of life that are equally important. For yourself and for your team, keep that perspective in mind. Balance your time among work, family, and personal interests. Urge your reps to make a list of the top 10 things they want to do in the next 12 months—not just work goals, but personal goals as well—and to look at it at least once a week to check their progress.
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Get out from under your e-mail. E-mail has its good points, but it can be overwhelming. It’s easy to feel that we are at the mercy of our email—that we have to pay attention to it at all times. People will call and say, “Did you get the e-mail I sent you 15 minutes ago?” The solution is to think of your e-mail as being delivered like your paper mail, and that you will only check it at a specific time. The idea that you must send an instant response is damaging to productivity.
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Rearrange your environment. Are you convinced you are managing time well because you’re doing things the way they’ve always been done? It may be that you are just taking the easy way out. You don’t have to make major changes to be more efficient, just make minor adjustments. Simply moving a file cabinet, changing your filing system, or moving your desk to a new position may make a huge difference. Look at your reps’ spaces and think about ways you might change their environment. And if it doesn’t work out, you can always put things back the way they were.
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Concentrate on one thing at a time. David Allen, a business expert, once said, “You can do anything, but you can’t do everything.” What I take that to mean is that you can do it all, but you can’t do it all at the same time. You have to acknowledge that you are a human being with human limitations. You have to take everything in sequence. Write down the sequence and say, “I’ll do this task first, it should take me this long. Then I’ll do the next one.” Otherwise, it’s like gridlock with everybody trying to cross the intersection at the same time. No one goes anywhere. This applies not only to business, but to life in general. It’s all about setting up a sequence of priorities. It’s common sense, but it’s difficult to think about when you’re caught in the fray. That’s why you need to make it a habit in your life.
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Customize your time management method. There are many useful time management tools and programs on the market today. One of them may work perfectly for you, but none of them work perfectly for everyone. Find one— or create one yourself—that is best suited for you as an individual. Every high achiever I’ve met has an individual system that he or she has devised to help manage time. Some are complicated, and some are as simple as a little black book. The system you use is less important than using a system that works for you.
“/ am definitely going to take a course on time management…just as soon as I can work it into my schedule.”
Source : Superstar Sales Manager’s Secrets, Revised Edition by Barry Farber
Did you ever…say hello to someone new before they said hello to you?
The world of manager is complicated & confusing. Making sense of it requires not of knack of simplification but the ability to synthesize insights from different mind-sets into a comprehensible whole.
