Confusing Activity With Results Leads To Poor Time Management: Time Management Tip

Sales people like action. You're high energy and you'd rather be out shaking the bushes than sitting in the office. That’s a good quality as long as you’re taking action on the right things.

Because you’re a high energy person in a demanding business responsible for your own results who is getting pulled in multiple directions all day everyday you have to become a fanatic about your time. Time literally is money to you because if you aren’t getting the most value from your time you aren’t getting the money you could be. Even though you have customers, staff, and sometimes sales managers all making demands of your time you have to allocate your time in the best way.

This time management tip is about gaining control of your time and income potential. If you allow others to pull your strings like a yo-yo they will, and you’ll be the one who suffers. To avoid this syndrome you need to develop routines and habits based on the best investment of your time.

One of the best time management tips when it comes to routines and habits is starting your day the night before. Before you end the day decide exactly how you will invest your time the next day. By that I mean know exactly who you will call, in what order, and have all the contact information at your finger tips for when you start the day tomorrow. Know exactly when you will review your email and voice mail and respond. If you allow the customer and others to dictate how and when you respond you’re training them to disrespect and ill use your time, and that is costing you both time and money.

You can’t predict the behavior of others, but you can predict yours. Everything isn’t a crisis so stop allowing every problem a customer has turn into one. When you think about the problems customers have you begin to see that most problems aren’t new, and that means you can develop a procedure for dealing with and responding to them. If you can develop a procedure for dealing with and responding to a problem you can identify entire problems or parts of problems that you can delegate reducing your responsibility to follow up rather than all the steps to resolve the problem. Now you have a predictable way for dealing with most of the problems that come your way so you can focus on the one to three most important actions for you to take each day rather than actions that don’t produce results. Use the free time management analysis to see how your actions measure up.