The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [15]
Group together all of your reactive work, including answering emails and returning phone calls.
Make sure most of your day is focused on proactive work such as prospecting or closing deals.
Step 6: Ask Yourself, “Will It Hurt Me to Throw This Away?”
Studies show that 80 percent of all filed or stored information is never referred to again. So why hold on to it? To determine whether or not to keep something, ask yourself, “Will it hurt me to throw this away?” Could you get it again if you needed it? If you’re a boss, the answer is usually yes. Throw it away. If I don’t specifically keep an email, it’s automatically thrown away by my system after 45 days. Maybe twice per year there’s one that I wish I could get again. And I usually can. One of my staff recently had trouble in that her email was working slowly. The technician looked at her email account and discovered that it had stored some ridiculous amount of old data because she kept every single email. After the technician had her clean out all the files she didn’t think she would ever need again, her stored email went from 2.7 gigabytes to 0.5 gigabytes.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are not 4,000 steps to time management and there is no need to track your time for three months before introducing time management into your life and your business. There are six simple steps:
Touch it once.
Make daily lists of the six most important tasks to accomplish.
Plan how long each task will take.
Assign time slots for accomplishing each task.
Focus on the difficult projects first.
Ask yourself, “Will it hurt me to throw this away?”
Master these six steps and you won’t believe the difference. Implement them companywide and you will be operating at maximum productivity before you know it.
Of course, even if you stick to these six steps, events and people will interfere and your schedule will be disrupted. Emergencies will come up that will take an hour or even two hours out of your day. As long as you’ve scheduled some flexible time into your day, some blank spaces in your schedule, you can accommodate those detours. The key is that when something interferes with your schedule, deal with it and then go back to your schedule!
Instituting Higher Standards
and Regular Training
Preprogram Your Organization to Run
Like a Finely Tuned Machine
According to an article in Harvard Business Review, only 10 percent of the population has what’s called “the learning mind-set.” These are people who seek out and enjoy learning. The other 90 percent of the population will not look to improve their skills unless they have to as part of their job requirement. Today, most professions—real estate brokers, accountants, financial planners, stockbrokers, lawyers, healthcare professionals, masseuses, and so on—have mandatory continuing education because they found that, without it, people wouldn’t keep current with the information necessary to be accepted as a professional in their field.
What if your doctor wasn’t required to keep up to date with medical advances and hadn’t looked at a medical text in 20 years? He or she might be prescribing medicine that is now known to be harmful or doing procedures that we’ve proven ineffective. Yet in most companies there’s little or no training and there’s rarely mandatory training.
Some managers view training as an interference with “work” to be done. But think of the tale of the woodcutters: Woodcutter A cuts wood all day. Woodcutter B keeps stopping and sitting down. At the end of the day, woodcutter B has three times more wood than woodcutter A. Woodcutter A asks: “How could this happen? You were resting all day!” Woodcutter B says: “I wasn’t resting. I was sharpening my saw.” Take time to sharpen your skills, your tools, and your resources, and you will be more productive.
The Tribal Method of Training
Joe’s Bank just hired Sam, and he’s about to go through his new-hire training. At Joe’s Bank, they use what I call the “tribal method of training,