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If you are like most managers, you invest a fair amount of time
in helping your salespeople prioritize and organize their
activities in order to maximize their productivity. And if
you're like most managers, the challenge of prioritizing and
organizing your own activities seems at times to be almost
insurmountable. Upper management has their (sometimes
unrealistic) idea of how and where you should invest your time.
Your salespeople present you with a variety of problems to solve
and disputes to settle. Customers need hand-holding. All too
often, "organizing" your time and activities takes a back seat
to just getting through the day.
There is a way to think about your activities; however, that
provides a framework for organizing them and increasing your
productivity. The first element to consider is time. There are
two major ways of framing time: short-term and long-term. Most
managers have quarterly and annual goals. Does your planning
extend beyond that time? Are you working on three- year or
five-year plans from time to time? Are you directed by monthly
or perhaps weekly goals? Depending on the exact nature of your
sales cycle and corporate initiatives, "short-term" and
"long-term" will have different meanings. However, you should
have a sense of what those windows of time represent.
The second element to consider addresses the nature of the tasks
and activities you perform. Over both the short- and the
long-term, there are tasks and activities you must perform that
are of major importance, and there are those that are of minor
importance. Whether they are major or minor is closely related
to the nature or the goals they are directed toward attaining.
Reading routine e-mail, for instance, is of minor importance
while gathering information to complete a proposal is of major
importance.
Using the dual aspects of the two elements, you can create a
four - quadrant matrix - a framework for thinking about the
tasks and activities which lead you toward achieving your goals,
and a tool for organizing and listing them. What kinds of
activities and tasks do you find yourself involved in over the
course of the day, week, and month? Where would you fit those
activities in the matrix?
In addition to the relative importance of your tasks, you must
consider the relative urgency of the task. Some tasks are very
urgent while others can be deferred. There can be urgent tasks
related to long-term efforts, like arranging a department
planning session, and there can be deferrable short-term tasks,
like responding to routine phone calls.
The matrix allows you to frame your time and the activities you
perform into a coherent and meaningful whole that will enable
you to ultimately improve your productivity. How? It will help
you create your daily "to do" list with a balance of short- and
long-term tasks of different degrees of importance and urgency.
It will help you find redundancies that can be eliminated. And,
it will help you identify tasks that can be delegated.
© Sandler
Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
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