Effective Time Management Skill: What are You Doing & What are Your Options?

Small business owners, and all independent sales professionals are small business owners, must have effective time management skills. Without effective time management skills you work yourself to death, you get little enjoyment out of life, and you have far less financial rewards than you could have. How can time management have such a tremendous impact on all those aspects of your business? Because when you don’t effectively manage your time you aren’t focused on doing the right things, and/or you do things the way you’ve always done them and that isn’t necessarily the best way.

Understand what you’re doing and why. What are you trying to achieve? What is the ultimate outcome you want in general, and from whatever you’re currently working on? If you begin to ask yourself these questions as you prepare to start each activity throughout your day you’ll begin to realize that you’re doing a lot of things that aren’t taking you closer to the ultimate result you want.

Ultimately, don’t you want to use your time more effectively so you have more money in the bank and more free time? Will reorganizing and color coding your files get that for you? Perhaps it will, and perhaps it won’t, but you need to consciously make that choice rather than doing it because it keeps you busy so you don’t have to do the things you don’t want to do to get what you want. Bottom line isn’t that what a lot of your activities are about? If you can keep yourself busy doing these non-money producing activities you won’t have to market yourself, make phone calls, or go on appointments? And you’ll be able to justify not having time for these activities that represent the most effective use of your time because you’re just so busy with all the details or putting out fires.

And why don’t you like to market yourself, make phone calls, or go on appointments? Is it because you aren’t having much success because you don’t really know how to do those things well? If that’s the case, then doesn’t it make more sense to invest your time working with a professional who can help you to learn how to do those things well, so you can get the results you want rather than spending your time on low value activities so you feel busy. Realize the best help may come from outside your industry. This is especially true if you’ve tried everything the industry experts have told you, but you aren’t getting the results you want. Productivity and activity don’t necessarily have a linear relationship. You can be highly active and not productive at all, and you can be very productive without all that much activity. The difference is in the type of activities you engage in and focus on.

What are your options? As you approach an activity and you determine the activity fits within the ultimate result you want, the next consideration to make is about potential options. Is the way you’ve done this activity in the past the only way it could be done? Are you the only person who can do this activity? Does it have to be done now or would it be better to work on this activity during a less productive time of the day? Explore your options until you find the best solution for you.