There are many articles that talk about how successful people set goals, write down lists, and are effective at managing their time. Those things are great, and I remember taking that advice to heart when I first started in the business world.
I would set my goal for the number of sales, cold calls, number of meetings I wanted to have, how many clients I needed to close, and wrote out all the minutia needed to making it happen. Then I would cram everything into my weekly planner and get to it. However, as Mike Tyson once said "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."
Things would pop up out of nowhere. A client would call in with an emergency. Our CEO would call a 2 hour meeting to discuss how we mishandled a compliance issue. A big prospect from 3 weeks ago called in and said he is in town and can meet me in 30 minutes as he is in between meetings and is flying back to Los Angeles that evening. A contract would come in over the fax but the client gave us the wrong credit card. My room mate fell ill and needs some help getting to the hospital. A litany of issues would arise to disrupt neatly laid out plans, and I'm suddenly playing from behind instead of ahead. I'm being reactive instead of proactive. It's Friday afternoon, and no deals closed that week and I don't have any good prospects for next week. What the hell happened?
The problem isn't that there isn't enough time in the day or week to get things done, the problem is that there is not enough time in our lifetime to get EVERYTHING done. What matters most is to get the important stuff done, so that if nothing else gets done, you have still accomplished something significant.
One of the most critical business management concepts that I've adopted has to be Stephen Covey's Urgent/Important matrix. The way it works is as follows. Write out your goals, sub goals, and to do list just as you normally would but the smallest time frame you can plan for is by the week as opposed to by the day. You don't have to put it in any order just list things out as they come to you.
On a separate sheet draw a matrix like the one above that has 'important' and 'not important' on the left side, and 'urgent' and 'not urgent' on the top of the matrix.
Urgent items are items that are time sensitive issues that if not taken care of promptly, an opportunity may disappear or a problem may occur. Important items are things that will move you closer towards your goal or at the very least, they are issues that if addressed will help keep you form moving backwards.
The idea of this exercise is to help move you from operating in the urgent and especially the not important quadrants, and focusing on the important but not urgent quadrants.
I'll use myself as an example. Urgent important in my business is when a customer has a problem, when I am closing a deal, and when I am coordinating the setup of a new client. It's easy to understand the link between revenue gained/lost by my actions in that window or opportunity.
Important but not urgent things in my business include tending to my marketing and social media, attending networking events, meeting with referral partners, and making sales calls. These are very important activities that will in most cases not result in revenue within the immediate 30 days, but definitely effect quarterly and annual sales.
Anything that does not fall into the Important Urgent or the Important Not Urgent is by definition, a waste of your time from a business perspective. Candidly, I am guilty of wasting time, as is everyone, but the idea is to keep it to a bare minimum so that when you are done with work for the day you can go spend quality time doing whatever your heart desires.
So, once you have got your priorities straight, take another look and apply an honest ranking of what are the top priorities of the week. These are the several items that, if nothing else is accomplished, would make it a successful week for you.
Schedule these tasks accordingly and then build your week around them. I like to leave gaps and tend not to overschedule a week because it gives me contingency time. If I have a gap that is not being used, I can allocate more time to working on social media, organizing, or getting content ready for the upcoming week.
Everyone's business and personality is different, but at the end of the day you want to get the biggest bang for your buck. It's not about knocking off 75 items on a 100 item to do list, it's about getting those handful of items that move your business forward the most. As Stephen Covey would say, keep the first things first.
Napoleon T. Butic
CEO Trout Payment Systems
info@troutpays.com
No comments:
Post a Comment