Although time is a key metric for success, I’m always surprised by how many executives don’t manage time as such. Indeed, time is a precious and finite commodity and those professionals who manage it wisely are the ones who achieve the best results. Show me an executive who doesn’t put time to its highest and best use, and I’ll show you an executive who is likely to be replaced by one who can. In today’s blog post I will examine the value of time.
Proper understanding of how to use time directly impacts income… Let me give you a personal example. I had my first six figure year when I was 24 (stop laughing… I know that was a long time ago) and I still remember the formula that got me there. $100,000 a year equaled $8,333 a month, $2,083 a week, $416 a day, and $52 an hour. I took those metrics and then applied them to my business development model to determine on average how many calls I needed to make to generate an appointment, how many introductions I needed to make to acquire a new client, and then compared them to my average. customer performance in terms of revenue to determine what my production hurdle was. I simply divided my profit goal into bite size metrics and managed my time accordingly. It was understanding how to use time that made the difference and that hasn’t changed over the years.
Whether you are a salesperson, professional advisor, entrepreneur or executive you only have 24 hours in a day that consists of 1440 minutes and reduced to ridiculous about 86,400 seconds. If you want to earn more, you must make more use of the time you have at your disposal. I make considerably more today than I did when I was a young professional, but I actually work fewer hours because I’ve learned how to use my time. So my question is this… how well do you put your 86,400 seconds to good use?
Have you ever heard someone say that they wish there was more time in a day? Well the secret is that you can actually increase the amount of time in a day if you know how to do it. Some people use only part of a full day, while others use the whole day, and those who are more productive use multiples of a day… Multiples of a day, you ask? In my world, there are much more than 24 hours in a day… Making good use of personal time, leveraging staff, technology, outsourcing in different time zones, improving the quality of the clientele I serve, making sure of providing clients with HUGE return on investment and a host of other factors I estimate that I can average what equates to about 12 work days in a single 24 hour period, while rarely working more than an average work week on a regular basis staff.
In two previous posts titled: “How productive are you?” and “The Power of Focus” provided ideas on how to get more out of your day. Understanding that time itself is a key metric for success is the first step. You can manage your time or let time manage you. Once you learn to manage your time, you may reach a point where you can start to leverage your time in multiples. The first step in learning to manage your time is to maximize personal time by avoiding the most common workplace time wasters. According to Swingline, the following items represent the top 10 time wasters:
1. Changing priorities;
2. Telephone interruptions;
3. Lack of Direction;
4. Waiting too long;
5. Walk-ins;
6. Ineffective delegation;
7. Lack of Organization;
8. Procrastination;
9. Inability to say “No”, and;
10. Meetings.
Time can be your best friend or your worst nightmare. Executives who understand how to use time to their advantage achieve great things, and those who let time slip through their fingers do not. The game is learning how to earn more through leverage while reducing your personal time investment.