Effective time management is one of the greatest challenges for businesspeople today, and especially critical for sales managers.
Our rapidly changing world is awash with information and distractions. We all l have too much to do and not enough time in which to do it. I is easy to allow our days to be frittered away with distractions and things to do. We can easily spend a day being very busy and accomplish nothing.
Our ability to create productive, as opposed to busy, days is critical to our success. It’s time to get serious about time management.
Ultimately, time management is about doing more of the most important things and less of the unimportant things. That implies, of course, that you know what ‘important “ is.
And that brings us to creating goals. Defining what is important is the primary benefit of setting goals. So, the first step to effective time management is creating annual goals.
What is important
A set of goals defines what is important, and by implication, what is not.
The purpose of the goal is not necessarily to meet the goal.
It is to change our behavior. It forces us to prioritize what is important and then to focus our behavior on those things. When you create a set of goals, you survey your life and job and consider all of the possible things you could do. You then methodically and intentionally select those categories of activity that are most important. And those most important things emerge as goals.
So, setting goals is an exercise in determining what is important. Annual goals allow you the flexibility of modifying what is important from one year to the next, as you and your circumstances change.
When you set goals, you think deeply about something once a year, and then you don’t need to think about it again. You are free to focus on implementing the action the goals describe.
Guidelines
A set of goals provides you with a measuring tape by which to compare and judge every potential action. Goals put guardrails around our actions, allowing us to make decisions with little hesitation because we have already thought about it deeply. For example, if you want to lose 30 pounds, when you are offered a double scoop of chocolate ice cream, you can use your goal to influence the decision. It is easier to say NO because you already made the decision when you set your weight loss goal.
You may have said, for example, that one goal is to spend a day every month with each salesperson. When the end of the month is quickly approaching, and you have a choice of spending time in the office and leaving early or spending the day with a salesperson who has been neglected all month, your decision should be obvious. You said it was important to you, and you committed to it. View your options through the lens of your goal, and the decision is easy.
Benchmarks
Goals provide a benchmark for you to periodically assess your progress and make mid-course corrections. If you said you wanted your team to create ten new customers this year, and it’s June and you have only one new customer, clearly something has to change. You need to take some kind of action. That issue would probably not present itself had you not committed to the goal of ten.
In that way, goals are an effective precursor to proactive action.
Truly, a set of well designed, well written annual goals is the starting point to effective time management. if you want to become more effective at managing your time, start with a set of annual goals.
For a free short course in how to set annual goals, click here. And scroll down till you come to How Do I Create Annual Goals?
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