Can You Really Manage Time?

Resources

This handout accompanied a FREE conference call hosted by www.MondayMorningSalesCall.com. Please see the web site for information on future calls. The conference was hosted by Mark Collins, eMortgageProfessor. He can be reached at 813-661-9122.

Please go to the Sales Call Feedback found at www.mondaymorningsalescall.com/feedbackcall.htm to let us know how the call went.

Go ahead, make my day. - Harry Callahan, police officer

It's how we spend our time here and now, that really matters. If you are fed up with the way you have come to interact with time, change it. - Marcia Wieder, America's Dream Coach

Your greatest resource is your time. - Brian Tracy, motivational expert

Lost wealth may be replaced by industry, lost knowledge by study, lost health by temperance or medicine, but lost time is gone forever. - Samuel Smiles, Scottish author (1812 - 1904)

How Poor Time Management Happens

It all begins with a plan. Haven't we all heard, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Your career happens one day at a time. The few moments you spend planning what happens in the future are perhaps your best spent moments. It has been estimated that for each minute you plan can save upwards of three minutes in execution. Additionally, having a plan creates greater assurance that the things you must do to be successful get done!

When you get right down to it you can't control time. You can't pause it, you can't fast forward it and you certainly can't rewind it. I'm sure you would argue that if you had a remote control for time you would get a lot more done. Well, you have a remote control and it's called planning and execution and we are going to look at both of them.

Law of the Hourglass

Todd Duncan, author and former loan officer, observed in his Law of the Hourglass that time management is really a waste of time. If you try and manage time and your day gets messed up early, it typically will stay messed up for the whole day (and probably impact your tomorrow as well).

Take the example of a close football game. If the losing team has the ball they typically use a "two-minute" offense to help them run as many plays as possible with the remaining time. Their objective is to call the best possible plays before time runs out. If in the end they lose, you might hear, "They didn't lose the game, they just ran out of time." That might make for good consolation but the bottom line is they lost the game!

Likewise, you must manage your moves during the day so that you make more sales. Create ways to help you make your best moves before time runs out. How can I prospect more, set more appointments, make time to study and prepare better, learn to overcome objections easier, build a better referral network or learn to go deeper with clients and referral partners?

If you don't know what's important you will make the wrong moves. Event management do the things that have the greatest ROI. You need to learn how to get first things done first. You must prioritize your events. It is important that you understand that the most important things generally require the greatest skill, the greatest motivation and have the greatest risk but these activities also provide the greatest return.

Todd believes strongly that you need to know what your hourly rate is and that you need to doing work that is commensurate with your hourly rate at least 75% of every day. You are just keeping busy if the work you are doing could be done by someone else for less than your hourly rate. You are productive when your time is spent on doing things that command your greatest talent and provide the largest return. Are you managing your business or is your business managing you?

Consider this, ff you want to take your earnings from $30,000 to $60,000 you need to start doing $60,000 things while you are earning $30,000. As Todd says, "If you don't do something differently, you'll be then where you are now only later."

Do You Tolerate too Much?

Spend a few moments reflecting on things that distract you to uncover elements of your life that you can live without. One distraction we want you to minimize is an area called "toleration". Tolerations are things that you put up with, accept, take on or are dragged down by. Examples include other people's behaviors, difficulties, unmet needs, unresolved issues, problems, distractions and frustrations. Eliminate those things that you have come to tolerate and the resources you spend on things that really matter will start to produce much more!

One of the best (perhaps worst is better used here) examples of tolerating something is failing to pass tasks along to others because you fear that the work will be inferior to what you can do. If you don't have the staff you need, then get it!

On the other hand perhaps you are saying "yes" to others because you think you "should." When all the while what you really wish for is that you could use that time to relax, play with your children or go to the gym. It's time to recognize your tolerances and and find ways to clear them up.

How's Your Clutter?

Another area that you need to analyze is your "clutter". Clutter is very similar to tolerations but concentrates more on the physical stuff, your emotional baggage, spiritual misgivings and mental images. Clutter takes up space in your life; it messes things up! Typically, clutter does not promote a good working environment. Just as a building site needs to be clean to be safe, your life needs to be uncluttered to be productive.

Are the rooms in your live conducive to calmness and serenity? Are they beckoning, welcoming, and serene? Or, do they make you feel stressed? If so, do you feel either the need to hunker down and frantically clean or to simply run away and lock the door behind you? Clutter creates chaos.

Acknowledging what you tolerate and where clutter exists can put you far along on your journey of getting greater balance in your life. Answering phone calls and emails that don't really matter, keep you from focusing on what really does. Thinking about lost or misplaced paperwork wears heavily on you and prevents you from operating at your peak. You may be constantly interrupted and never find the time to start the projects that matter most to you.

You do have Limitations

One of the best things to enhance your performance is first acknowledge that you have limited resources; your time, your energy, your talent and your treasure are limited. You must evaluate what is consuming your resources and determine whether or not to allow those things to continue to consume you.

Identifying what you can do without and what isn't working for you are two major steps toward freeing yourself up to focus on things that matter most. Analyze your day, your habits, your relationships, your job and your life to identify those things that aren't putting you closer to your goals and your visions. What are you doing that perhaps you can get someone else to do instead? Event and priority management are aspects you need to become very proficient at.

Time is 4-D

For thousands of years geometry has been the province of Greek master, Euclid. His three-dimensional arsenal of spheres and triangles clearly reflected the truly exciting aspects of the real earth. This concreteness matched well with Victorian scientific rationalism; classical geometry was regarded by educators as science's apogee. But recently a revolution had taken place in mathematics as time was acknowledged as the fourth dimension.

Time is truly four dimensional for those of us who want to manage it. The four D's of time we are concerned with are described below:

1. Do - Critical and important items that are objects in time that you must do now.
2. Delegate - Critical but unimportant items that are objects in time that you can delegate to others to do.
3. Delay - Non-critical but important items that are objects in time that you can delay doing.
4. Drop - Non-critical and unimportant items that are objects in time you should not do at all.

Time Blocking

One major tool that can help you control events in time blocking. Examine the image below and you can see how easily your day can get complicated:

What happens in time blocking is that you schedule your time to make sure you achieve your most important objectives. Let's take a look at how Todd Duncan might have blocked one of his days did when he originated loans:

5:00-6:45am – personal quiet time and workout, 7:30-9:00am – sales meeting or pipeline review with processing, 9:00am-12:00pm – hot leads follow up, paperwork 12:00-1:00pm – lunch, 1:00-6:00pm – pre application consultations (PACs) or target marketing, after 6:00pm – personal time.

Here is another example of a high producing loan officer's day:

An Easy Way to Double Your Income

According to several major studies salespeople don't spend as time time as they can on selling. A special report from The Dartnell Corp., a Chicago-based business publisher found that salespeople spend less than 50 percent of their working time actually selling. More. than 50% of a sales representative's average workweek is not spent selling, but traveling, waiting or doing paperwork.

Unfortunately, we believe Dave Hershman when he said, "The average originator spends less than 20 percent of their time marketing. Why not spend more time on this important task? There is not enough time. This is why the typical loan officer has too much stress in their life. They are spending too much of their day dealing with customers, paper work and fighting fires. They are spending too little of their day marketing—which they know will bring them more business."

The major reason loan officers don't spend more time marketing can be summed up in two words, poor processing. Much time is lost because loan officers feel that they must stay on top of every file at every moment. If you don't have a quality processor find one ASAP. The time you spend working on files you have already generated is time that you can't spend creating income and wealth.  If you can't process well, you can't sell well.

After you feel comfortable with your processor, one quick and easy way for you to double your income is to spend twice the amount of time on building your referral network, prequalifying borrowers and getting referrals. If you spend 10 hours weekly on these things, start spending 20 hours on them and before too long you should see a dramatic impact on your earnings.

Helpful Web Sites

FranklinCovey: Save up to 80% at FranklinCovey

eLifePlans: Set up your life plan

AllBusiness.com: Time Management Query

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