6 PROactive Steps To Maximize Your Time

What are you doing with your time? Are you using it wisely? There are a million and one things that need to get done throughout the day, but are the things you’re doing going to help you make money? It is a fact, no matter who we are, we all get the same 24 hours in a day. It is what we do with that time that sets us apart from the next person.

Have you ever met a person that works all the time, maybe even too hard, but never seems to get anything done? How does that even happen? The better question is, how can we prevent that from happening? The answer: time management!

Times are changing and at the speed of a mouse click. According to Hyrum W. Smith in his book, The 10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management , “the daily treadmill is accelerating, and we have to run faster and faster just to stay in place.” The fact is that not everything that needs to get done today for your business will actually result in profit today. But I’ll bet that you can change some things that will benefit your business.

If your peak hours for making sales are from 4 to 9, then don’t spend it surfing the net for equipment or for that new program that you need; Go make a sale! Save preparing mailers, doing research, updating your website, and things of that nature for when you don’t have the opportunity to be out growing your business. Why would you interview someone during your peak selling hours? Interview them later! If you don’t have time to send out those thank you cards at a later time, then simply get up earlier. This isn’t rocket science!

Webster’s definition of budget is to plan or provide for the use of in detail. If you can learn to master time-budgeting, then I guarantee you will have a much larger number to work with for your financial budget.

Here are 6 steps to help ensure that you are PROactive rather than being active with your time. By following these simple steps you will ensure that you are being PROactive with your time and in taking your sales and your career to the next level.

1. Take inventory of your time; recognize what is good and bad

   A mentor of mine suggested that I keep a log of everything that I did, minute by minute, for an entire day. If you do this and you will see how your time is being spent. This will also help you realize how much time you really are wasting! Also by keeping track of your activity during the day, you will be able to see where PROactive activities can be added! Let’s say you must commute for 45 minutes a day, why not start listening to books on tape? If you listen to 45 minutes per day for a week, you’ll have listened to 3-5 books in a week. Imagine how that could affect your sales!

2. Decide what to cut out of your day

   Once you have taken inventory of how you spend your time, you then can figure out what you should eliminate. Some things can be cut completely while other activities should have a limited amount of time that you can spend on it. One option, to better your time, is to make your day longer; try getting up an extra half hour earlier at the beginning of the day and going to bed a half hour later at the end of the day to prepare and reflect. If you look at your schedule and see those blank areas and you have no idea what happened in that time, I’m sure you’ll be able to locate time-wasting activities to cut.

3. Decide what you should add

   What things could you add to make your day more productive? You should ask yourself: What am I not already accomplishing in my day? What would I like to accomplish in my day? What am I doing now that I should devote even more time to? For instance, if my goal was to make better sales, I could call an extra 3 people a day. Three phone calls will take less than 15 minutes from your day, but in 1 month it would amount to an extra 72 calls! That’s almost like adding on an extra day of work into my month, using time that I would have otherwise wasted!

4. Set the priority

   How you spend your time should reflect what is most important. I bet you knew that, but do you follow that rule? Sometimes there is just not enough time to get everything done in one day, if there was then what would you do for the rest of the week? Put your tasks in order of importance so that you don’t end up spending your time on all of the wrong things. They say that ‘time is money,’ so if that’s true, let’s invest it in the right place.

5. Schedule a time to review

   The most important step in a PROactive process is to review and reflect at the beginning and end of each day. If you do this, even on days where you’ve wasted time, you can at least reflect back on the day and learn from it. Then apply what you’ve learned and make changes. I like to reflect and plan my days the night before, and then in the morning, all I need to do is review what I’m going to do that day over my cup of coffee. Don’t be discouraged if you find more and more black holes in your day that seem to eat away your time, because the more that you can find and fix, the more proactive you will be in the future.

6. Put it in action now!

   Now! Get to it! Don’t waste time! Action without planning is fatal, but so is planning without action! Because if you don’t take action, then reading this was just another time-vampire in your day.

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