Time Management Technique for Agents and Advisors: The Chaos Comes from How You Store Your Details

This time management technique will help successful agents and advisors to control the chaos, and not so successful agents and advisors to be more successful. You have two levels of details that you need to track in your business. You have the action level related to all the activities required to run the business, and you have the customer level related to all the activities required to obtain and maintain a customer. The big problem here is that you try to store too much of it in your head, and what you don’t store in your head you store in multiple places making things unnecessarily complicated. n nMary Kay Ashe was a big proponent of the KISS philosophy, keep it simple sweetie. When it comes to time management you want to make that a mantra running in your head always challenging yourself as to how you could make things simpler. When you don’t you end up feeling unnecessarily stressed and overwhelmed rather than energized and confident. Of course, you want to feel energized and confident because that will help you to be even more successful. nnDevelop a single once a week dumping station. The main thing is you want to get all these things you need to remember and keep track of out of your head. When you try to keep all this stuff in your head all that clutter causes undue stress because your mind keeps bringing the stuff to your attention even when you can’t do anything about it. You also have the terrible stress of wondering what you’re forgetting now. So, let’s stop all that nonsense right here right now. A super simple way to develop your once a week dumping station is to create a template that you use to record all the activities and actions you need to take once a week. nnKeep your dumping station simple and readily accessible. There are lots of electronic tools you can use, but when your hard drive crashes or your away from the gizmos how will you be able to quickly access that information so you can keep on going? I’ve found a template that you can work on for about 10 minutes once a week and print out to take with you everywhere you go to be one of the most effective dumping stations track all the time related stuff you need to track. Now each week you have certain things you have to do as a standing commitment, put these things go in your template so each week when you print it off they are already there. That way you aren’t re-writing stuff. I refer to this template as my “to do” list. On the template for you “to do” list you’ll want to have 2 tables positioned landscape on the page. One table is just for “to dos” and the other table has sections for phone calls, results, and ideas you want to hold for future planning. n nTo get on your “to do” list there must be an action required. So if Bob Smith has entered your sales funnel you can’t just write his name on your “to do” list. You can enter Bob’s name as a heading and then list all the required actions like: review appointment and develop recommendations, go over recommendations with Bob on Thursday, submit Bob’s paperwork, and enter Bob into client follow-up contact program. That way everything you need to do is right there so you can check it off as you go and you reduce the risk of forgetting to take care of all the activities needed for Bob. The things you want to do later or can’t take action on now are also there so they don’t get forgotten. The phone list has the names and numbers of all your calls, and the results section allows you to track all your results for the week in one spot so you know exactly where you are every minute of every day. So when you call Mary Jones and set an appointment you immediately add her to your tally for appointments made in the results section. And when you schedule time to plan you’ll know exactly what you want to work on from the ideas for later section. Use this KISS time management technique to control the chaos and bring on the self-confidence you deserve.n