Jon Samsel

It’s been said that the key to sales success is learning how to budget your time. But the term “time-management” seems to create a false impression of what a person is able to do. Time-management is actually self-management. Time can’t be managed. Time is uncontrollable; we can only manage ourselves, and our use of time.

It’s interesting that the skills we need to manage others are the same skills that we need to manage ourselves: the ability to plan, delegate, organize, direct and control. Part of this includes being able to recognize what wastes your time.

Here is a list of common time-wasters:

1. Shifting priorities and crisis management
2. Lack of priorities/objectives
3. Procrastination
4. Too much clutter
5. Attempting too much

Ideas for Effective Self Management

1. Define your objectives as clearly as possible. Do you find you are not doing what you want because your goals have not been set? One attribute of successful people is their ability to work out what they want to achieve using written goals, which they review constantly. Your long term goals should impact your daily activities and be included on your “to do” list. Without a goal or objective people tend to just drift personally and professionally
2. Analyze your use of time. Are you spending enough time on the important things? If you are constantly asking yourself “What is the most important use of my time, right now?” it will help you to focus on ‘important tasks’ and stop reacting to tasks which seem urgent (or pleasant to do) but carry no importance towards your goals.
3. Have a plan. How can you achieve your goals without a plan? Most people know what they want but have no plan to achieve it except through hard work. Your monthly plan should be reviewed daily and reset as your achievements are met. Successful people make lists constantly. It enables them to stay on top of priorities and enable them to remain flexible to changing priorities. This should be done for both personal and business goals. The value of a good plan is to identify trouble spots early and seek out solutions. “I don’t let a single day go by without knowing why I didn’t capture a sale. Be sure to measure the progress you make toward your goals because what you can measure you can control.

Self-management is not a hard subject to understand, but unless you are committed to integrating time-management techniques into your daily routine you’ll only achieve partial results. The lesson to learn is that the more time we spend planning our time and activities the more time we will have for those activities.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 10:03 am and is filed under E-Business, Management, Sales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.