CIBN Connect | Triple your Personal Productivity
Triple Your
Personal Productivity
By Kerry George
I've heard from a lot of business owners that there never seems to be enough time; time to grow their business, feed their kids, and maybe even sing a little. There's Plenty of Time, we're just terrible at managing it. We waste time, spend it on the wrong things, and allow ourselves to struggle for too long before deciding to learn. There are people that manage a booming business and still have time for dinner with the family each night. What's so special about them? Their secret - is that they're better at time management than you.
Make the most of your time and increase your productivity:
Learn how you waste time by tracking it. Even if you’re the best worker that you know, you still waste a lot of time. Determine how you waste time at work and at home. Notice what you do when you’re sick of work, tired, bored, or stressed. Do you sit at your computer staring at it at the end of the day? Do you have several windows open on the computer and get lost as you try to finish tasks? Using your time effectively is a key component of becoming more productive.
Just for your own education, keep a stopwatch at your desk. Keep track of how much valuable work you do each day. This doesn’t include time spent checking your email, looking out the window, chatting with a friend on phone, or drinking coffee.
Go through your last week and think about each day. What did you spend your time doing? Try to fill in the blanks as much as possible. This will give you one week of data, but it will be missing a few details.
This week keep a notepad at your desk and track everything you spent time on. No judgement. Just write it down. This will give you a second week of data and it will be more accurate as you write it down while it is happening. The two weeks of data together will be very telling about how you spend your time. You can’t make corrections if you don’t know what to correct.
Organize your calendar with color coding. Make all of your sales appointments red so they stand out and you can quickly see how many you did. Color your client fulfillment time orange so you can see how much time you spend delivering what you promised.
Make your prospecting/networking time blue so you can see where your new clients are going to come from. Do you train others on your team? Color it gray so it stands out.
Double Your Income Producing Activities.
What are the things that you do that actually make money? For most business owners these things are our income producing activities. They are things like making appointments, doing the appointments, writing the proposals, closing the deal, and following up on the ones who said they wanted to talk next week or next month. When you go back and look at the time you are tracking in the first exercise there will be a clue here in how much time is spent on this activity. 80% of what you do brings in 20% of your revenue. 20% of what you do brings in 80% of your revenue. What is in that 20%? What if you double the time that you have on that 20%? What would that do for your revenue? Most people who do this exercise suddenly discover that make a very good income for a few hours a week and then not so much as they let mundane tasks carry them away. What do you do, that makes the most money?
Designate Helpers.
Once you have established the few things that you should be doing to double your income, who is going to do the other 80% of what you do? This requires letting go. If you are trying to work less for a short period of time, there may be a few things that could be put off over that short season, but if they are left undone in the long term, they will likely just stack up causing you future stress. Who could you get to assist you? Perhaps you need a virtual assistant. Maybe you have a partner or spouse who could help with a couple of those things. Could you use students or volunteers? Ask for help at CIBN Connect. We often have access to programs, and we know great people who bill out for less than you do. This is important because if you make $200/hour while you are selling, you should keep selling and give the 80% of the things that you do away to people you employ for $20/hour. That is good business. We can find you virtual assistants, social media managers, marketing professionals and even people to do your networking for you, so you can focus on what you need to do most.
Eliminate distractions.
While some people can concentrate with chaos all around them, most of us do best with as few distractions as possible. Control what you can in your environment. The fewer distractions you have, the more you can accomplish. This means keeping your desk organized so stacks of papers are not distracting you. Put the paper in piles and designate a priority pile with no more than 5 documents in the pile. That is your pile for the day. Everything else must wait.
Prioritize your priorities.
If you have 10 priorities, you don’t have any priorities at all. Develop a list each evening of your three top priorities for the next day. Do everything you can to accomplish those three things. Avoid wasting time each morning trying to determine how you’ll spend your day. You should already know when you wake up.
Spend time selling when it is a good time for your customers. There are only so many hours in the day. What is the time that your client’s and prospects need from you? That is priority selling time. If you need to see clients from 10:00 am to 3:00 pm then don’t let anything else take that time. Marketing messages can be written later in the day when nobody is available for a sales meeting. Courses can be watched on video after the course is over. Don’t let anything interrupt your sales time or your revenue will take a hit.
Take planned breaks.
There are two kinds of distractions. One is unplanned and that is usually disruptive and damaging to your productivity. Those are the ones you want to eliminate. However, a planned break, or a planned vacation, or a planned night off is a positive distraction that refreshes your soul. Look for places in your calendar to plan some outings and when you take that time, give yourself fully to the process. Live in the moment and create memories with the people you love.
Develop an evening and morning routine.
The most successful people are the most productive. And the most successful people also have a evening and a morning routine. Go to bed with a plan for tomorrow. Look at your calendar for the next day. Prepare your mind for it. Get out of bed early before your first appointment and get your day started productively. Have a good breakfast, exercise, meditate, or go over your affirmations. Have a look at your goals and read them out loud. Start your day with intention and don’t just fall into it. Plan it and do it.
Time Block.
List building has some effectiveness but anything that takes longer than one hour is not a task, it is a project. Go look in your calendar and time block out the two hours that you need to get that thing done. Call it a project and book the time in your calendar. This is a priority time that nothing can interrupt. This is an excellent way of building systems into your business and systems that are automated will later save you many hours of work creating more productivity in your life. Time blocking is not about working harder, it is a worthy tool in your tool kit for working smarter.
Choose the best time for each activity in your life.
Do you buy groceries at the most convenient time, or do you go when everyone else is at the store? You could save a lot of time by going after 7pm in the middle of the week or early on Sunday morning.
Consider how and when you do things. Could they be done in a better way or at a better time?
