How to Improve Time Management? Overcome Bad Habits!

How can you improve your time management in order to sell more?
Can you truly find more hours in the day?

Whether you’re new to sales or you’ve been in sales for a while, time and how you use it can be the determinant as to whether you’re a top-performing sales professional (or “not so much”).

In this post, we’re going to talk not only about how you can put time to work for you, but also how you can use it, the standard above the crowd, and be that top-performing sales professional.

Improving Time Management: 3 Bad Habits to Overcome

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Now, let’s get into it.

First off, set up your day for success. What does that mean? I’ve done other videos and posts on managing time, but this one, I wanted to approach it a bit differently.

1. Mindset: Set Up Your Day for Success

a positive mindset promotes positive time management
When I say set up your day for success, it starts with this: Getting out of bed and telling yourself,

“This is going to be a good day”.

Now, I’m not a fan of woo-woo-type stuff. (You know that about me.) However, what we tell ourselves tends to be the case.

So if you get out of bed and say, “Wow, this day sucks. I’m really tired. This is not going to go well. I’ve got a meeting, it’s not going to be fun. “Guess what? It probably won’t be! All those things will probably come true.

Instead, if you get out of bed and say, “Wow, my back’s killing me. It’s raining outside, but you know what? Today’s a new day. I’m above ground. I get a chance to sell, which I love to do, so it’s going to be a good day.”

You have to start your day with the idea that you’re ready for the day. You’re the only one that can tell yourself that.

No amount of podcasts you listen to is going to get you in the mood. (By the way, I have a podcast, Sell More with Casemore if you didn’t know.)

You’ve got to get yourself in the mood, and it starts by telling yourself it’s going to be a good day, right? I think there’s an old saying, and I’ve recently heard Kevin Hart say that any day above ground is a good day. And that’s absolutely true.

So start out your day with the right frame of mind to ensure that you have success.

2. Technology: Manage It (vs. Allowing It to Manage You)

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The second thing I want you to consider when it comes to managing time, and putting time to work for you is you want to be the one that manages your technology, not have it manage you.

My son recently started in high school. We had to attend a couple of different meetings and presentations, and the principal, who I’ve known actually for some time shared that they have a mantra, which is “use the technology to be helpful, but don’t let it use you.”

I think that’s so powerful. Even I’m guilty of checking my phone after hours on weekends, evenings, because I never know if a client might need something, but is that healthy?

Here’s the problem: On days when I’m checking technology a lot, I’m eating away at my productive time.

When you look at your schedule, and there are important

tasks,
activities,
projects, or
presentations that you need to focus on,

turn your phone off, and put it away!

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If you going to go into a meeting with a prospect, I hope you’ll be turning off notifications on your phone. So treat other important tasks during the day the same way.

If you’ve got to make those outbound calls in the morning, then shut notifications off.
Better yet, close your computer.
Write your notes on a piece of paper, and put them in your CRM system later, not now.

Now you’re focused with no distractions.

So put technology to work for you. Use it to help you, but don’t let it manage you. Don’t let the notifications and dinging bells and red lights and all those things distract you from what’s important, which is time to sell.

What happens if you do get distracted?

What happens if you’re researching a client? You land on a website that sells, I don’t know, boats. You’re interested in boats.

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Next thing you’re looking at different materials and fabrics and thinking, should I call my wife and tell her we should buy a new boat? What happened? And then you go, oh my gosh, what have I done right? I just burned 10 minutes of my life. I probably won’t get the boat. And that’s time I could have been selling.

It’s okay. Reset and start again!

You’ve heard me say before that my son, one of my two sons, actually, both of them are into sports, one more so than the other. And when they lose a game or if they’re in a game and is not going well, one of the things that the coach will actually do if my son is pitching is walk to the mound.

Do you know what he says at the mound? He says, “Hey, so how are you doing? How are things going? What’s new? Whatcha going to do after the game here?”

Why? Because he’s distracting pulling my son out of whatever mental state he might be in to distract him, get him back on course. And as he leaves, he simply says this. He says, “Boy, guess it’s time to get back to it.” That’s the approach I want to take.

If you find you go down a rabbit hole, you get sucked into a meeting or a call that you didn’t really want, don’t beat yourself up over it. Simply say, “Okay, reset. Time to get started. I leave it off and get back to it.

Don’t waste any time worrying.
Don’t feel guilty.
It happens to everybody.
Move forward.

When it comes to mastering time, many of us have bad habits, even outside of technology.

So one of my bad habits is technology. I find sometimes I use it to just kind of zone out a bit, but it’s also a bad habit for me to go outside and wander around.

3. Breaks: Set Limits

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Breaks are healthy.

I’ll take a break and I’ll go outside and I’ll maybe walk around, but I’ll tend to go do stuff. Like, oh, here’s some weeds I’m going to pull out of the flower garden.
Or, oh, I got to fix this. I got to head downtown and I don’t know, stop by the garage to order a part, whatever the case might be, and I tend to get distracted.

Then I look and think, well, that was supposed to be 15 minutes. It’s been 45.

So I realized I had to master my bad habit of wanting to step away. I typically want to step away when things are getting difficult and require a lot of thought, that tends to be my pattern. Instead of putting the thought and effort in. I know a break will help me, but those breaks can go long.

So what I simply did was say, “Okay, I know I need a break. How do I ensure the break doesn’t go long?”

I put on a timer and say, “It’s break time.” Boom. My five-minute timer on my phone starts. When my break timer goes off, no matter what I’m doing, back to work.

I got my break and I mastered my bad habit of letting that 15-minute break become much longer. Now, sometimes I go beyond five. Sometimes it is fifteen, sometimes I keep it to five. That’s all I need.

Master Your Bad Habits to Improve Time Management

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What are your bad habits, and how are you mastering them?

How are you overcoming them?

What can you do to ensure that those bad habits don’t consume time in your day?

I encourage you to check out what I call my free 30-Day Sales Action Planner. It’s organized in a way that you can actually set up your goals, and your targets for the next 30 days, and it prompts you through managing your time to achieve those targets.

Click the link and download it in PDF form, so you can fill it in electronically or print it off and write on it. Whatever you prefer to do, it’s complimentary. It’s my gift to you.

Download your 30-Day Sales Action Planner and put it to work on improving your time management today!

Improving Time Management: 3 Bad Habits to Overcome

1. Mindset: Set Up Your Day for Success

2. Technology: Manage It (vs. Allowing It to Manage You)

3. Breaks: Set Limits

Master Your Bad Habits to Improve Time Management

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