MARKET TRENDS: Go From Interruption Driven to Goal Driven

Do you become easily diverted or distracted by situations, new tasks or people rather than maintaining the focus on your goals and objectives? Consider for a moment that if your e-mail program is set to download e-mail every five minutes, in essence, you are scheduling an interruption for yourself every five minutes.
 
While many people feel the need to multi-task, there are many similarities between managing your mind-set and managing your schedule. Each activity or task that you engage in requires a change in your thought process and focus.
 The solution to this problem is time blocking, the art of allocating blocks of designated time for specific activities or tasks throughout the day that are aligned with your goals and the realistic number of hours you have.
 
First, look at the hours you have to work with. If you have a nine-hour workday, you realistically have about eight hours (or less) because buffer time is needed for activities that take longer than expected or are undetected during daily planning, i.e. unscheduled meetings, traffic, emergencies, new projects, family/client demands, etc.
 
Then, make a list and prioritize the tasks to be included in your daily routine. Establish time lines for each task. For instance, if you spend time prospecting or cold calling, separate new prospect calls from follow-up calls so you don’t shift your energy away from your focus on each task. 
 
Now that you have a schedule, learn to better manage the interruptions. The biggest culprit when it comes to interruptions is e-mail. For example, let’s say for every five minutes you check your incoming e-mails, you lose one minute. That’s 12 minutes per hour, and one hour and thirty-six minutes per eight-hour workday.
 
A solution: Change the time you have your e-mail program set to receive e-mails from every five or 10 minutes to every four hours.
 
E-mail is a great tool for communication, collaboration and correspondence, enabling you to communicate quickly and conveniently, but you need to make sure this tool continues to be productive and efficient for you.
 
If managing your e-mail like snail mail sounds extreme, ask yourself these questions to determine a realistic e-mail checking frequency:
 
1. “Are the bulk of my e-mails time sensitive? Does my ability to quickly respond to an e-mail determine whether or not I will earn a new customer’s business?”
 
2. “Can I still honor my prospecting campaign, provide the same level of service to my customers, and not compromise my ability to attract new customers or perform my job effectively if I respond to e-mails only twice a day?”
 
This same strategy can be used for telephone calls.    If creating blocks of time to respond to e-mails or phone calls would compromise your ability to do your job effectively, then this strategy may not work for you. However, if you have a degree of flexibility in your job to do so, try checking and responding to e-mails and phone calls every two hours. If two hours still doesn’t work for you, try doing so every half hour.
 
Take the next week to determine if there’s a specific time throughout your day when you receive the bulk of time sensitive e-mails and phone calls. There still may be an opportunity for you to block out designated times for responding to calls and e-mails at less frequent intervals than you are doing now.
 
The fact is, even if you change the frequency of when you check your e-mail from every five minutes to every 10 minutes, you have just cut the time you can lose in half.
 
Become someone who is driven by goals rather than by distractions. The more effective you are at time blocking, the greater the quality of your life will be. If you are responsible for attracting and retaining your customers, your ability to manage your customers’ expectations is a direct reflection of your ability to not only manage your schedule but your mind-set as well.
 
Make time your ally.

The author is president of ProfitBuilders, a business consulting firm. He can be reached at 888/262-2450 or info@profitbuilders.com.