Manage My Employees

Short Article #33

To recap Monday’s Short Article #32 Interruptions Threaten Time Management:

Interruptions can be enormous drains on productive time. The time wasted most commonly affects activities like project management success, hitting deadlines consistently, or maximizing selling time for the sales force. 

There’s no doubt in my mind that wasted time due to unnecessary or ill-timed interruptions add up quickly:

• There’s the amount of time the interruption actually takes and…
• …the time for ‘recovery’ which represents the amount of time required to get our concentration and focus back on to the work we were doing when we were interrupted.

Both factors, can and often do, reduce our personal productivity by thirty minutes, an hour or more.

I advised a large sales force on improving time management and increasing selling time a few years ago. Do you have any idea what the single biggest killer to selling time was in that company?

Answer: salespeople shooting the bull with one another on unnecessary conversation.

Surprisingly, the salespeople admitted that it was not uncommon for HOURS of time to be wasted on unnecessary conversation, every week. Wow!

No wonder the sales manager sensed that his team needed help with time management.

Here’s the good news… after implementing a few of the steps below, the company could ‘free up’ over 1,000 hours annually of additional selling time across its sales force. That translates into more sales and more profits.

Try these steps whether you’re a busy manager, leader, small business owner or salesperson.

5 Steps to manage unnecessary or ill-timed interruptions and increase productive time:

• Hold your calls for a specific amount of time.
• Block out time for important activities and don’t allow any kind of interruptions.
• Ask the people who regularly stop by or call to make a list of their questions or issues, and then set aside a few times each day when you can deal with these interruptions without negatively impacting other work.
• Have co-workers put questions in e-mails and answer with replies, or in-person, later.
• Turn off e-mail or cell phone alerts when you need to stay focused.

Obviously, some steps won’t apply in every situation. Pick and choose the ones you can use and free up time to focus on the tasks that pay off for you!