Own Your Time

Time management is a multibillion dollar industry. For good reason: we stink at it, we know it, and we think someone else always has “the system” that will finally help us master it. Consider the planners we buy, the PDAs, the software we install, the workshops we attend, the books we read.

Yet, after drinking them all in, we still complain about not having enough time in a day, or doing things when we get around to it, or that we have a lot on our plate. Worse, we let our families suffer while we work late on projects that could have been done earlier or are inconsequential.

I think the reason is that too many people, at least in our profession, avoid owning their time. I mean owning it in a complete way. They instead fly by the seat of their pants, allowing an hour here, 45 minutes there, to simply flit away without productivity. Before long, you’ve lost the equivalent of a day across just a five-day work week.

Increasingly, if you want success in sales, you better own your time, with specific daily, weekly, and/or monthly routines, at least minor victories each day, and the self-discipline to say no to distractions and interruptions.