Making the Most of Your Time

Sales Mastery, Sales Training
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There are 40 hours in the average workweek; 2080 hours in the year.  How many of them do you waste?  If you’re like most people, perhaps as much as 25% of your time could be spent on more productive activities.  With better time management, you can increase your income substantially.

What’s your time worth?  If you make $50,000 per year, you’re worth $25 per hour, $100,000 per year and your time is worth $50 per hour.  So when you waste an hour on something that’s not producing income for you, you’re throwing away money.

The biggest time wasters are bad habits – things that we do on a regular basis that seem to become just a normal part of our day.  Some of the worst habits we have are:

  • Letting people interrupt us on non-essential things
  • Failing to delegate things that others could do
  • Spending too much time with prospects where the chances of winning the business are poor
  • Handling paperwork more than once
  • Procrastination
  • Lack of organization
  • Dealing with the easy stuff first; procrastinating on the important stuff

One of the best ways to make the most of your time is to have written goals and plans, and to focus your energy (and your time) on them.

Goals help you identify what’s important to you…what you should be spending your time doing.  If you’re doing something that’s not related to one of your goals, you need to question why you are doing it.

Spend your time on high payoff activities.  These are usually activities that are directly associated with generating more sales and making more money.

Here are some other good ideas.

1. Make a To Do List every day.  Prioritize each task and do the important things, not the easy things, first.
2. Stay focused.  Put distractions aside and keep the end results in mind.
3. Set specific deadlines for getting important things done.
4. Divide projects into smaller units.
5. Get help; sometimes you can’t do it alone.
6. Attack difficult jobs when you are mentally sharpest.
7. Reward yourself to keep the motivation going.
8. Make a commitment to getting the important things done first.

Self-Study Assignment:  What are the most significant time wasters for you?  Make a list and develop a plan to eliminate them.  Stick to the plan until you’ve eliminated the time wasters.