Get Your Work Done in Sixty Percent of the Time
A person who has not done one half his day’s work by ten o clock, runs a chance of leaving the other half undone.
Emily Bronte wrote that nearly 170 years ago.
Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
Cyril Parkinson wrote that nearly 60 years ago.
Were they right? They were right as rain. Every Financial Advisor and every wholesaler in the world should pay careful heed to those warnings.
Watch the video or red the transcript below to learn how you can get your work done in sixty percent of the time.
I can tell you without hesitation that the amount of time you spend marketing yourself this year determines how much you will grow next year. If you don’t prospect and market yourself, your business will wither and die.
I can also tell you without hesitation that running your business gets in the way of growing your business. The details eat up your time. There are only so many hours in the day. What to do then? Why do we give tasks more time than they need and what can we do about it?
We give projects too much time when we fail to set deadlines.
Without deadlines, your time is essentially unstructured. You’ll take forever to get those tasks done, if, in fact, you ever get them done.
Now add the fact that prospecting is a huge task with no deadline. The need to prospect never ceases. All the other tasks consume your time until there is no time for prospecting.
Five o’clock rolls around and you haven’t prospected that day. After enough days like that, there is no salvation in hitting singles and doubles. You have a hit a home run to catch up.
The longer you put it off, the larger the task gets, until it’s overwhelming to even contemplate prospecting. You don’t know where to begin.
One obvious remedy is to assign deadlines.
Also, assign your tasks priority. That’s an easy one. There is seeing people and there is everything else. Advisors fail because they don’t see enough people, not because they don’t complete enough tasks.
There is nothing more important to the survival of your career than looking someone in the eye and asking him to become your client. Until you are satisfied that your business is big enough, your number one task is getting the word out.
It doesn’t matter how many names you have in your cell phone. How many cell phones is your name in?
Decide how much you want your business to grow year-over-year.
Then spend your time accordingly. Get your tasks done by noon. It doesn’t matter how you do it. It doesn’t matter how much you have to do. Just do it. Get those things done. Then spend the balance of the day prospecting and marketing.
If you don’t get them done by noon, those tasks will fill up your entire day. And you still won’t get them done. They’ll fill up tomorrow as well.
I work well with deadlines. Perhaps you will too.
If your tasks have a deadline, you will work more efficiently. You’ll work even more efficiently than that if another person is involved in the deadline. If a client needs it by Friday, you’ll get it done by Friday or pay an awful price. If your assistant or your boss needs it by noon, you’ll get it done by noon.
Not all tasks carry the same weight.
Steve Jobs would go on retreat with his top one hundred people. One thing Jobs always wanted to know was what had to be done and when.
He would ask those one hundred people what was important to get done. He would cross off any ideas he thought were without merit. He would eventually get the list pared down to the ten most important tasks, tasks that absolutely had to be done.
Finally, he would cross off the bottom seven, telling everyone “We can only work on three things at a time.” It’s a very smart idea to put more effort into fewer things.
So cut your list down, assign deadlines and make your daily work go away by noon.
Then spend the rest of your time meeting people and telling them what you do.
All the organization in the world won’t help you if you can’t get an appointment.
To hone your prospecting skills, join Don Connelly 24/7.
What do you think about direct mail marketing? PS I have heard you speak several times when you were working at Putnam.