Even though time is a key success metric I am always amazed at how many executives don’t manage it as such. Time is indeed a precious and finite commodity and those professionals that manage it wisely are those that achieve the greatest results. Show me an executive that doesn’t leverage time to its highest and best use and I’ll show you an executive likely to be replaced by one that can. In today’s blog post I’ll examine the value of time.
The 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 years old (stop laughing…I know it was a long time ago) and I still remember the formula that led me to attaining that figure. $100,000 dollars a year was equivalent to $8,333 dollars per month, $2,083 dollars per week, $416 dollars per day and $52 dollars per hour. I took those metrics and then applied them to my business development model to determine:
- How many calls I needed to make to generate an appointment;
- How many presentations I had to make to acquire a new client, and;
- What my average client yielded in terms of revenue.
By simply using the above three steps I was able to determine what my production hurdle was. Once I understood my production hurdle I broke down my earning goal into bite size metrics and managed my time accordingly. It was understanding how to leverage time that made all the difference and that hasn’t changed over the years.
Whether you are a sales person, professional advisor, entrepreneur or executive you only have 24 hours in a day which consists of 1440 minutes and when reduced to the ridiculous about 86,400 seconds. If you want to earn more you must make more out of the time you have at your disposal. I earn considerably more today than I did as a young professional, but I actually work fewer hours because I’ve learned to leverage my time. So, my question is this…How well do you leverage your 86,400 seconds?
Have you ever heard someone say they wish there was more time in a day? Well, the secret is you can in fact increase the amount of time in a day if you know how. Some people use only a portion of a full day, while others leverage the entire day and those who are most productive leverage multiples of a day…Multiples of a day you ask? In my world there are far more than 24 hours in a day…Through making good use of personal time, leveraging staff and technology, outsourcing across different time zones, upgrading the quality of clientele I serve, making sure to provide clients with HUGE return on investment and a number of other factors I estimate that I’m able to average nearly a full week’s work into a single 24 hour period while rarely working more than an average work week on a personal basis.
In two previous posts entitled: “How Productive Are You?” and “The Power of Focus” I provided insights on how to get more out of your day. Understanding that time itself is a key success metric is step one. You can either manage your time or allow time to manage you. Once you learn how to manage your time you can then get to a point where you can start to leverage your time into 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:
- Shifting Priorites;
- Telephone Interruptions;
- Lack of Direction;
- Attempting Too Much;
- Drop-in Visitors;
- Ineffective Delegation;
- Lack of Organization;
- Inability to say “No”, and;
Time can either be your best friend or your worst nightmare. Executives that understand how to use time to their advantage accomplish great things and those who allow time to slip through their fingers don’t. The game is to learn to earn more through leverage while decreasing personal time investment.