Is time on your side?

Time is crucial to your business success, or any success for that matter. Imagine not getting to work on time and finding five customers waiting... What would you do about it? Or if your business is service related and you are constantly late for appointments, what now... Too many businesses people are getting caught up in the time trap and before long discover the pain of running out of time.

Some will say time will run out anyway, so just do what you can. I consider time to be a precious commodity and often know that without a plan of action for the day I will soon become 'bogged down' with distractions. Whatever time means to you, ensure you have a way of handling it to maximise the potential of it to ensure your ultimate success.

Example: What if you could plan your time out so that you avoided known trouble spots and were able to keep things in greater perspective? Like the sales team that knew Monday mornings were a hassle with clients starting out the week after a busy weekend, they scheduled meetings on these mornings and ensured that staff were informed of what had been taking place during the week. They had rescheduled a normally 'dead time' to give it a greater impact on busier times.

Many people discover that time has disappeared when it is too late to do anything about it. Action needs to be taken to correct the situation in the future, otherwise the same thing will happen time and again. Making sure you are using your time wisely is a detail often overlooked. One organisation found they had a staff member 'tied up' doing bookkeeping duties when they needed another counter sales person. The cost of an external bookkeeping service was minimal in comparison to the person's wages and the loss of customer loyalty with too few staff available at the time. This allowed them to leverage their time (and their resources) better.

To get your business to be timely in its approach, consider measuring the daily efforts of the staff. Getting them to jot down what they did after an hour and then have them do their own audit of the time they spent during the day. This can build responsibility for their actions, gives them an understanding of the time situation and raises their awareness of trouble spots in the day. Of course the information is theirs to keep and is not shared as a measure of their 'tardiness' with a supervisor, however it serves as an indicator for their own personal standards.

Their is only so much time on offer, its what we do with what we have that makes a difference.

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