3

Can You Really Manage Time?

Technique #2: Learn How to Manage Your Actions and Choose to Spend Your Time

What is time management—and can you really manage time? Before I answer that question, you must understand the important distinction I introduced in Chapter 2: the difference between being busy and being productive. Everyone is busy; not everyone is productive. Being productive requires you to engage in activities that produce results—which can pose a problem for some people. It’s much easier to come into the office and focus on the little, simpler things that don’t take very long to do. However, 5 minutes here and 10 minutes there add up. Before you know it, the day is over—and you’ve not spent any time on activities that produce your desired results.

I will admit that while I was writing this book, there were times when I would’ve much preferred entering business cards of people I had met recently into our CRM, bookmarking websites I had torn from magazines and journals, or—heaven forbid—even filing papers in our office. While each of these activities was not time-consuming by itself, once I added them up, it could’ve easily been an hour of my time—an hour that would have been better spent focused on writing this very chapter! Although it may have been less stressful for me to complete these less challenging activities, it was a more productive use of my time to have our client services assistant take them off my plate or to put them off until a later time when I had already ...

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