What is time?

With the assumption that we will live to age 80, we all have 4000 weeks across the span of years, more or less. How many weeks you have left is an interesting thought, isn't it?

The most valuable resource that a salesperson has is time, and how you use that time will have a direct effect on how successful you are. It is amusing to note that companies spend a lot of their time measuring and reviewing salespeoples' targets and other activities associated with it, but there are very few who look into the time management part of it. Some sales managers I meet have little advice to offer on territory management except not to drive too far between meetings.

Time management and the desire to accomplish more has been identified as one of the key problems amongst salespeople.

A common goal amongst salespeople is to become wealthy and most are incentivised to chase the commissions. However I would expand on this financial definition of wealthy to include all aspects of your life. So the meaning of being truly wealthy is to have enough money and time to be able to balance it between family and friends, cash and accounts, personal well being and real good enough time for yourself.

This diagram illustrates this well. There are 4 things that you must hold paramount and keep on a perfectly even keel: your personal time, your work, your friends, and your family. Many executives and other professional people find that work swallows their lives. They end up giving drops of time to themselves and their friends and relations. Then, the next thing they know, they are giving up their own few precious drops of time to satisfy their friends and relations. So they end up not having time to pursue their own interests. There is no longer any time to work out or read or just go for a stroll. They can definitely forget about such time consuming activities as horseback riding or even taking personal development courses.

Lots of sales people feel as if they are not gaining all that they deserve because their lives are not fulfilling. I see this all the time.

At the ultimate extreme there are high flying executives in the City for example, who have such a demanding job that they have no time for themselves or family and friends. In some cases, these people lead very shallow lives in which monetary gain is the sole focus.

Take the example of Richard Gere in the film Pretty Woman. Burnout is an occupational hazard for City traders. It can really make you feel lousy and consume your life. Don't allow this to be something which happens to you! Here are some tips on how to effectively organize yourself.

There are four ways to look at the way we utilize our time.

1 - Not Important and Not Urgent

2 - Not Important but Urgent

3 - Important and Urgent

4 - Important but Not Urgent

Firstly Not Important and Not Urgent as Distraction We all get distracted at work by a multitude of activities which do not contribute to the role we are supposed to be performing. Typical distractions are things like personal email that's constantly arriving on your computer along with the irresistable urge to drop everything else and take a fast peek! There are a few things you could do. For example, you could check on your eBay auctions, or you could look into a social networking website.

Secondly Not Important but Urgent, as Delusion Do you ever get that sense that you have been working flat out all day and achieved absolutely nothing? This can be called busyness and is caused by being purely reactive to others. Unexpected visitors, favours from fellow employees, meetings for meetings' sake, somebody else's problem being dumped on you and so on. This is just something that happens to everyone at some time.

Thirdly Important and Urgent as Demand on your time. Here you are just working away. You meet with your customers. You present your findings. You make your necessary calls. And so it goes. These types of tasks should be taking up most of your business day. Your goal should be to divide your day in such a way that each area of your life is seen and attended to as an objective on the way to that goal. So who really has one and stays with it?

At last. Important but Not Urgent. The ZONE

This is the area that gets most commonly ignored or squeezed out by other time grabbing activities. This is an important item and we know we should all be doing these activities, but we come up with easy excuses like not having enough time. If you were running your own business this would be the area where the activities would be defined as working on your business rather than in it.

For the salesperson, activities like account planning, personal activity plan, training courses for personal development and meeting with potential strategic partners. When I am working with salespeople and sales managers on a one on one basis, this is the first area we focus on.

Just as a simple exercise, what would be the smallest coin you would stop in the street to pick up? How do you value your time?

What can we do to be sure we make every minute count?

I am going to share a story with you about a French philosopher. A large crowd gathered around the man who stood up front to talk about the priorities in people's lives.

He placed a big glass atop the desk in front of him, then, taking a container full of stones, he painstakingly dumped them into the glass receptacle. He put as many rocks in the jar as he could. Then he asked the audience, "Do you think the jar is full?" One man spoke up and said, "Yes!" He shook his head and then took a bucket of small pebbles and carefully poured then into the jar on top of the rocks shaking them down into the gaps between the rocks until the pebbles reached the top of the jar.

He asked the gathered crowd again if they thought the jar was full. Some muttered yes without being 100% sure. He shook his head again and reached for a bag of sand which he then carefully poured in to the jar again shaking gently until all the gaps had been filled between the rocks and pebbles.

Once again he questioned the crowd on whether or not the jar was full, and once agin the crowd wasn't sure. He shook his head for the final time and produced a large pitcher of water which again he carefully poured into the glass jar until the water reached the top. He then turned to the crowd and said now it is full.

What was the lesson to learn? If you want to be a productive person and squeezethe most from every minute of your day, you need to prioritize your tasks correctly. You have to identify that type of rocks they are so you can link them back. (important and not urgent) and enter them at the top of your list, because if you don't, the small stones, sand and water will use up every available inch of space, leaving now space for the rocks.

So the exercise I urge you all to do is write down what your rocks are and allocate time in your schedules to do them, and have the discipline to stick with this and not be distracted and deluded by other interferences.

Ultimately you can build up what I refer to as a default diary, which we will discuss at a later date.