Make Better Decisions About Where You Spend Time

A decision to do something is really a decision not to do everything else. Once you commit to spending your time and energy doing something, those same resources cannot be used to do anything else at that same time. That makes the decision as to what you do the most important decision you make, and you make it countless times throughout the day. Yet you don’t recognize that you are making this decision.

When you decide to spend time scrolling through the social webs, entertaining yourself and trying to keep with what everyone else is spending their time on, you have made the following decisions:

• Not to prospect
• Not to nurture your dream clients
• Not to send thank you notes
• Not to prepare for you sales call
• Not to review a trade journal for the verticals you serve
• Not to return your voicemail
• Not to answer the questions your prospect asked you to answer for them
• Not to update the records of your relationship
• Not to plan your following day
• Not to plan your following week
• Not to role play the conversation you need to have with a big prospect
• Not to take your operations team to lunch
• Not to improve the hand-off you make to your internal team
• Not to prepare a scorecard that proves you are doing good work for your clients
• Not to develop a proposal and road-map showing your clients where you go next
• Not to call your existing clients to thank them for their business
• Not to create a lead list
• Not to research prospective clients so you can pursue them aggressively
• Not to sharpen your scripts
• Not to ask your manager for coaching around an issue
• Not to do something more important 

The above list is 20 things that you might do that would produce better results for you then spending time doing something that isn’t aligned with your goals, or something that produces no real results other than to entertain and distract you.

Being truly productive only happens when you spend your time on the things that are most important when it comes to doing meaningful work. To be productive you have to make better decisions about whether you spend your time on the trivial or invest it on what is important.

You may never have thought of all the things you are not doing. Now you will.