When you are in business or sales working harder is smart. Working smarter gives you more time and profit. Yet only a few will ever master their time to achieve the results they dream of. Wouldn’t it be fantastic to unlock the secrets to your hidden potential? Think of what it would feel like to have success and the time to enjoy it!
To make time management strategies work for you, you will need a plan. To accomplish that, you will need the right information. You will also focus on how to accomplish more in less time without the guilt and stress you feel when you lack control!
Factors to consider with time management techniques
You need to know that:
- Effective time management skills are complex because many factors determine how well you accomplish your goals. That’s why few ever achieve the control they seek.
- Unscheduled interruptions kill time and waste your energy by changing your focus. They distract you from completing the actions that are important for your business. They change your focus toward other actions—which may be fun for a while but will hurt you in the long run.
- Traditional time management strategies are a waste of time when you are not leveraging your own unique abilities. You need a very personal, custom time management strategy to be most effective.
- It is hard to focus on the important things when you don’t have time to think. Effective planning must happen in advance. Otherwise, you’ll be in reaction and have no way to plan for success.
However, every day you find yourself trying to maneuver through a maze of different and competing business activities. On a typical day you may have products you need to deliver to clients, invoices to process, updates to your database and other administration, all while fielding phone calls and endless emails. These business responsibilities get mixed in with other personal appointments and by the end of the day you are exhausted. You’re even wondering if you made any headway at all. Sound familiar?
Some people think time management is simple. Get a calendar, block your time, create some systems to support your efforts and ta-da! Success, right? If you’ve ever tried that approach, you know it’s not that easy!
So, what’s the catch?
Most business coaching programs don’t tell you the secrets that make time management strategies effective. If you attend a time management seminar or a conference and you’ll find it won’t give you a personalized plan that suits your unique performance style. And without the right knowledge and practical skills, it’s hard to guarantee success. Let’s look at some of the information that comes for those coaches that have expertise in time management.
Secrets that business coaching professionals know about time management
- What is Time Management Really About?
Time management has very little to do with time and everything to do with how we manage ourselves as business professionals. Business coaching professionals call this “self-mastery”, and it has a profound effect on moving your business and sales forward.
Here’s what you need to know: First, you need to discover what I call your Action Style, or the way you achieve things. Your Action Style combines your individual motivation, beliefs and follow-through styles. By breaking down the best way for you to work, success becomes much closer and within reach. Your Action Style is your unique way of getting things accomplished
When you understand your own personal Action Style, you can practice time management skills that suit your personal style! It’s that easy! With the right information and focus, you can achieve the success you have been dreaming of. Our coaching members enjoy learning how to use their natural strengths and action styles to accomplish more in less time, without feeling guilty!
- You Need a Strategy in Your Calendar to Handle Unscheduled Interruptions
It’s easy to think about how you want your calendar to work, write it down, and then follow the schedule. If you have ever done that, you know that within a few hours your perfect calendar is completely off course… and of no use at all. To make your calendar work, you need a strategy for dealing with each of the unscheduled interruptions that take you off course.
Unscheduled interruptions kill time and waste your energy. When you change focus from the key actions that build your business to others that may be fun for a while, you will hurt your business in the long run.
Our coaching members learn about the kinds of things that distract them and then learn how to manage their precious time to achieve even bigger goals. In fact, within the first few weeks of working through our personalized business coaching program, our members will free up to 3-5 hours on average every week!
- Leveraging Creates Extra Time Every Day
One of the most important success technique of highly productive business owners is that they have learned how to take everyday activities and create a systematic process that will work automatically, without them. Think about it! You get paid full price for a product or service you offer and only work a fraction of the time you used to! Even better, what if you had someone complete your task at a lower cost, while still billing your full rate. That’s how you leverage your activities, gain valuable time and increase your profit.
Here is a simple example:
One of our coaching clients was running her business and was already familiar with subcontracting specialty work to other professionals. Even though she had outsourced some tasks to contractors, she still found herself working extra hours and lacking time to get everything she needed to get done completed. When we discussed her busy calendar, she mentioned that much to her surprise, one of the tasks in her calendar took far more time than she originally thought. After a short discussion we developed a processing skill that would save her time. In fact, this technique alone saved her 20 hours in the first month alone. Becky’s greatest benefit was that she not only saved time, but she could take that same information and make it into an information product that she could sell to future clients!
‘OK – so let’s review…
There are a lot of reasons time management can be difficult to master. Most importantly, the solutions need to be customized to your unique situation and how you work best. By hiring a performance coach to help you, you’ll be taught everything you need to know to gain control of your time and produce the results you want. That will help you get the breakthroughs you’ve been longing for. All you’ll need to do is decide what you want to do with all the extra time you will have!