by Keith Rosen
For the recurring tasks/activities you know you have only a finite amount of time to engage in or are pretty confident in how long they truly take (prospecting, going to the gym, taking a bike ride, e-mails, reading the newspaper), leave them alone for now.
After discussing this strategy with one of my clients, she said, “If I add even fifty percent to each activity per day, my day would end at ten in the evening rather than five in the evening, which it winds up doing anyway!”
Herein lies the greatest lesson. If that’s the case, then you have too much on your plate. Hey, it’s up to you to accept this hard truth or not.
The intention of this chapter is to honor the timeline it takes to finish something so you are able to complete these tasks once they are part of your routine rather than always running out of time and leaving them incomplete.
Facts:
You can’t safely drive from New York to Washington, DC, in two hours.
You can’t play a great round of golf in an hour (eighteen holes).
You can’t train for one week and expect to be in great physical shape.
The point here is, if you have a ten-hour work day, you can’t effectively complete ten hours of tasks in that time period, even with all your good intentions. So if you look at what you normally have in your schedule and then total up the time it would realistically take to complete your daily to-do list, I’m sure you’ll see a disconnect between the hours you invest in your typical work day and the time it would take to complete your daily tasks.
You have a choice to make. If you follow this strategy, you will likely continue beating yourself up, feel guilty about what you are not getting done, and make yourself feel bad for not completing what you said you would, even when completing those tasks was impossible from the start with your best efforts at play. If this tactic isn’t working for you or enhancing the quality of your life, then commit to changing to a better more realistic approach today.
To recap, you can continue to pile on more activities and tasks that you won’t get to anyway, which will make you feel bad for not completing them at the end of day. Or you can begin to underpromise to others and to yourself by putting realistic timelines on your calendar and the activities you engage in so that at the end of day, you feel great for accomplishing what you said you would in a productive, realistic way!
Setting up your routine using time blocking as outlined in this chapter makes it possible for you to determine what you can and cannot do. It forces you to be honest with the time you have available. This way, you can prioritize your tasks and engage in the ones that best serve you.
When you realize how little time you actually have, you will become more sensitive to what you’re putting in your day and will increasingly appreciate how valuable your time actually is.
Once you get used to this process, you’ll be amazed and excited about the results you’ll experience, especially in terms of how you feel. This will also provide you with the opportunity to actually breathe throughout your day.
After all, what’s the worst that can happen? Instead of running out of time, you’ll actually be running into it!
Go Do: Take Three Steps
Work through the “Three Steps to Completing Your To-Do List Every Day” as detailed in the beginning of this chapter. This will help ensure that you have allotted sufficient time to complete the tasks on your calendar realistically while knowing how to manage other people’s expectations.
[PART TWO]
CHAPTER 12
Determine the Best Time for Each Activity
Be Mindful of when You Are Operating at Peak Performance
Determine the most appropriate time for the activities you engage in by first uncovering when your peak productive hours are. By now, you know exactly which activities you need to be engaging in. Now it’s time to ensure that you are engaging in those activities at the absolute best times throughout your day and week.
For example, being on social media or reading a magazine during peak business hours or during prime prospecting hours is probably not the most effective use of your time. Peak productive hours are for engaging in the activities that you have deemed a priority. So they need to be done at certain times during the day.
Which activities from your action-item lists or other nonnegotiables require you to interact and collaborate with others (e.g., one-on-one coaching sessions, team meetings, client calls)? What part of the day would be ideal for others who are involved to participate in these activities?
Now that you have identified which activities during your peak productive hours would be best to engage in, try to schedule those activities during the time when you are operating at peak performance. When are you at your best?
Some creative people find that they are most creative in the morning hours. So for them, scheduling time in the evening to develop new marketing pieces or to write a new blog post may not serve them best. The creative juices for others don’t seem to start flowing until after 10:00 p.m. Everyone is different. It’s crucial to know when you work best and plan accordingly. Some prefer exercising at 4:30 or 5:00 a.m., while others prefer to do so after dinner. Honor your personal rhythm of when you function at optimal performance.
I realized years ago that I do my best work in the morning, so I start my day at 4:45 to 5:00 a.m. That’s when I engage in the more creative work and the writing I need to do. I also know that I’m not one who can exercise in the evening, so I also make sure I plan my exercise and workout regimen in the morning hours as well.
When Do You Schedule Your Coaching?
What about coaching your direct reports? Outside of situational coaching conversations, which can happen throughout the day, when do you schedule your coaching sessions with your direct reports? And what if the time you want to coach them doesn’t align with when they want to be coached? Even though you may be able to recognize when you are at your best for each activity, sometimes you may not be able to get that in perfect alignment when others are available or the times that work best for them. Use the tools you have as a coach to prepare for each scheduled one-to-one coaching session to maximize every coaching session.
E-Mail, Texts, and Phone Calls
More distractions are being created daily that become our greatest temptation and greatest nemesis. This includes apps, texts, e-mails, phone calls, or anything else that keeps your eyes glued to your phone or computer screen.
Now, imagine yourself focused on writing an important e-mail response to a client. Your phone beeps. A text is coming in. At that moment, you have a choice. You choose to shift the focus of your energy and thoughts from the e-mail you were working on to the incoming text. Inefficiency ensues, and the text is taking up time. Whether it’s ten seconds or ten minutes, that time is compounded over days, months, and years.
For example, let’s say that for every five minutes you check your incoming e-mails, you are losing one minute. That’s twelve minutes per hour. In a ten-hour workday, consider that you are losing at least two hours every day from unproductive distractions!
If you are a sales manager who is also tasked with certain kinds of creative responsibilities in addition to managing a sales team, consider that creating a marketing piece or writing an article requires a different mind-set than answering a phone call, creating a presentation, preparing a quarterly report, or replying to an e-mail. Allowing certain interruptions will surely stall or block your focus and flow of creativity, affecting your level of productivity. Imagine trying to play golf, tennis, and baseball at the same time!
Consider this solution. Turn off all desktop and phone e-mail notifications, and then schedule set intervals for when you will open and check your e-mail. Depending on your situation, effective intervals for checking e-mail can range from every fifteen minutes to every four hours. While this may sound excessive, I’ve heard of some people treating their response time to e-mail like regular postal/snail mail. That is, with less frequency since your regular mail is only delivered
once a day.
Sure, e-mail is a great tool for communication, collaboration, and correspondence, enabling us to communicate quickly and conveniently. The point here is to ensure that this tool continues to be productive and efficient for you, without consuming your life.
Managing your e-mail like snail mail may sound challenging for your situation. Trying to check your e-mail only once every four hours can feel like an eternity to some people.
One expectation we have established regarding internal e-mail communications at Profit Builders is that no e-mails are inherently urgent. If we send someone else an e-mail, we don’t expect that e-mail to be replied to immediately, and we know that the recipient understands that as well. An unwritten rule we have established is that if an e-mail is urgent and requires immediate attention, then we will send the other person an accompanying instant message or text requesting that they look at their e-mail and reply. While this may appear to be inefficient because it requires sending two communications instead of one, we have learned that very few e-mails are actually urgent, and by not demanding instant responses, an occasional extra few seconds sending an instant message more than makes up for needing to constantly monitor and reply to e-mail.
As you work on determining you own e-mail strategies, ask yourself these questions:
“Are most of my e-mails time-sensitive? Does my ability to respond to an e-mail quickly determine whether or not I will earn a new salesperson’s trust and thrive as a sales manager? Is it possible that this is a costly assumption?”
“Can I still provide the same level of support and coaching to my team and not compromise my ability to be available to them or perform my job effectively if I respond to e-mails at certain intervals during the day?”
“What type of hybrid solution can I create that would work for best managing my incoming communication while setting the proper expectations with my team?”
If creating blocks of time to respond to e-mails or phone calls would compromise your ability to do your job effectively, then this strategy may not work for you. However, if you have a degree of flexibility in your job, consider this. Instead of checking and responding to e-mails and phone calls every four hours, make it two. If two hours still doesn’t work for you, try doing so every hour or half hour.
Go Do: Develop an E-Mail and Phone Call Strategy
Determine at what intervals you will be checking your e-mail (e.g., instantly, every four hours, every two hours, every hour, every thirty minutes) and schedule it into your routine/calendar.
The fact is, even if you change the frequency of when you check your e-mail from every five minutes to every ten minutes, you have just cut the time you can lose from this diversionary tactic in half!
This same strategy can be used for telephone calls. Consider blocking out time throughout your day to do so. Whether it’s once, twice, or three times a day, allocate a designated block of time to make or return calls.
Here’s another thought: Take the next week to determine if there’s a specific time throughout your day when you receive the bulk of time-sensitive e-mails and phone calls. There still may be an opportunity for you to block out designated times for responding to calls and e-mails at less frequent intervals than you are doing now.
[PART TWO]
CHAPTER 13
Plan for the Unplanned
Build In Automatic Buffers
One thing all people struggle with is managing their time well enough to end each day feeling productive rather than frustrated when looking at a long list of to-do’s that were left incomplete. In this chapter, I share a secret to getting everything done each day—without the stress.
You can be the most talented sales leader on the planet, but regardless of how talented you are, either you own your day or your day owns you. And if you’re the type of person who feels a bit out of control when it comes to time management due to the things you feel you can’t plan for, here’s how you develop a healthy, daily routine that will enable you to end your day feeling satisfied and productive rather than stressed and overwhelmed.
I want to revisit the list of three reasons we find it so challenging to adhere to our schedules or complete our to-do lists that I shared in chapter 10:
Not being realistic with how long each task or project will take
Not planning for unplanned externalities (e.g., upset clients, unplanned meetings, a change in project scope)
And finally, not being realistic with what you already have scheduled in your day (such as getting ready in the morning, eating breakfast, or commuting to work)!
In this chapter, we’ll be focusing on the externalities in number two above. “Externalities” are things we don’t necessarily plan for. They often go unnoticed and fly under our radar screen when we are attempting to map out our week. They have a tendency to eat up our days.
These externalities can also be things like additional time on the phone; traffic; a project or proposal you’re responsible for that has a rapidly approaching deadline; a conversation with a customer or coworker; meetings; a timely problem you need to handle; a request from a peer, boss, or direct report that needs to be handled immediately; and e-mails that take on a life of their own.
Many of these things blindside us because they’re outside our direct line of vision. Then we wonder why we’re often unable to finish everything that’s on our plate for the day.
Now, because we don’t have a crystal ball to inform us about the imminent things that would unknowingly consume part of our day, imagine if you were actually able to plan for these externalities; these same tasks that often go left unplanned? What if you actually planned for the unplanned?
Learn to Plan for Distractions
One of my clients was a bit resistant to this idea. She shared with me that once a new client hires her company and procures her services, the unplanned begins happening immediately. Irate customers call in, and people want things addressed and handled yesterday.
This client is in the emergency restoration business. So the only time she gets emergency calls is when people have experienced a major or minor disaster such as a fire or flood! As you can imagine, it’s probably hard to plan when she will be receiving these calls.
When the calls come in, customers are harried, upset, fearful, angry, or uncertain. And every time my client received a call like this, she would act surprised, as if it were the first time she had ever experienced it! “I can’t believe this is happening again” would be her typical reaction. “The phones are ringing nonstop!”
When I asked her how long this has been going on, she said for fifteen years—ever since she started her business.
This would be similar to a doctor who works in the ER and is continually shocked at the number and degree of emergencies that come through the door, saying, “What? Another emergency?”
The solution for this client was apparent. Instead of resisting the truth, she began to embrace it, and the truth was; this is her business! She is in the business of providing not only solutions to her customers’ restoration nightmares but providing support, guidance, and reassurance that it will all work out okay.
Instead of being continually shocked at how her customers react when calling her, by embracing this as part of her business and accepting the truth, she was able to more effectively plan for it. She began to make the shift from being highly reactive to responsive and service oriented by anticipating these situations and raising the bar on creating the ideal customer experience, rather than being shocked when they occur.
Embrace Consistent Inconsistency
Here’s an exercise worth doing if you want to take back your day. Think about how many hours you work each day. Let’s say it’s ten hours a day. Now, what most people do is schedule or anticipate that they have ten hours each day to complete tasks, meetings, projects, or activities they intend to get done by day’s end.
Now, consider on average how much time you invest in the activities or tasks you didn’t plan for, such as
the externalities I mentioned earlier. Let’s say they equate to three hours each day.
Do the Math
If you work a ten-hour day and three of those are consumed with externalities, or things you couldn’t anticipate planning for that need to be handled, then how many hours do you actually have available each day? That’s right—seven!
The challenge is, if you ignore this fact because you “have to get everything done,” you have a choice to make. You can either embrace this truth and be honest with the amount of time you really have each day and actually build these three hours of externalities into your day, or you can ignore this reality, continue to schedule ten hours of tasks each day into a seven-hour block of time, and then be frustrated and disappointed every day when you don’t get everything done.
Many managers admit that the simple act of scheduling everything in their calendars, including blocks of time for unplanned interruptions and inevitable impromptu or situational coaching moments, ends up being the single most important change of behavior they make in their attempt to take ownership of their day. This change allows them to take ownership of their day and finally be able to invest the proper time needed to develop and support their teams.
Build in Buffers (Nonnegotiable)
Some clients tell me that even though they may budget four hours a day in their five-day workweek for the unplanned, one entire day of unplanned events or tasks can show up. The good news is, if you have budgeted your time correctly, then you can use the blocks of time you have allocated for those externalities throughout your week that you didn’t use to complete the other tasks that went unfinished during that one day of unplanned activities. This is yet another example of how an effective routine is a living, organic process and personal operating system.