Thoughful Thursdays - Time flies

If you are the sales team for your business you will know that scheduling time can be problematic from time to time. If you are a one person business that is growing, "from time to time" may be quickly become all the time.

No matter what the situation, planning your activities will help you make the best use of your time. How you plan those activities is also important to effective time management.

If you think about it time is easy to measure. A second is a second, 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day and so on and so on. Yet we are always running out of it., whether it is due to cramming too many activities into a specific amount of time or unforeseen events causing it to take longer to accomplish the activities.

Here are a few planning tips you may find useful:

• Schedule appointments at minimum of one week in advance and allow for the worst case in travel time.
  
• Avoid back to back meetings without a break between.
  
• Use the time between calls to write your meeting reports and check and respond to voicemail and email.
  
• Stick to your meeting agenda - that means have a meeting agenda.
  
• Commit to your schedule, if a customer calls and needs to see you urgently, qualify the urgency before cancelling any meetings.
  
• If you are running late or must cancel read this great article from Mark Suster titled The Right Way to Cancel a Meeting.

Good selling,
Richard