Time Traps
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Time Traps

Todd Duncan

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eBook - ePub

Time Traps

Todd Duncan

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About This Book

Sales quotas, stress-filled days, and long working hours fill the schedules of salespeople everywhere. In Time Traps, author Todd Duncan teaches readers that this formula is all wrong--and proclaims that it's possible to achieve more sales success with less stress, earn more family time with less frustration, and gain more money without investing life-consuming hours at work. The key, he shares, is not time management--after all, managing time is an impossible task to undertake. Instead, he shows readers how to manage what they do with the time they're given. Highly acclaimed by some of the biggest names in the business, sales, and leadership industries--including bestselling authors Stephen R. Covey and John C. Maxwell--Time Traps includes tips for balancing and maximizing time, saying no more often, leveraging time-saving tools and technology, and prioritizing life amid professional chaos. More than that, the book explains why these things are so important in the first place, and how allowing time for one thing can actually produce more output--not less--in other areas of your life. Research shows that as much as 75 percent of the time people spend at work is a waste of that valuable time--used for menial tasks rather than making sales. This straightforward and actionable guide will help you break out of this statistic, so you can propel your career--and your life--to new heights, starting right now.

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Year
2010
ISBN
9781418513924
s1
Chapter One
Time Matters All the Time
When Does It Matter to You?
“The problem with life is that it’s daily.”
— JEFF DUNN, PUBLISHER
You could hear the wind screaming past the open door. My executive team and I were two-and-a-half miles above the earth and it was time to jump. The man standing by the large opening in the plane’s side shouted over the noise. On zero you could not hesitate. We had practiced on the ground all day; we had studied how to jump and what to expect; our packs were secure and tightly fastened, and we had donned our helmets. Now it was go time. We were as ready as we were going to be. The four of us smacked our hands together and hollered in out-of-character fashion the way guys do when they’re acting courageous. Then came the moment of truth.
“Three—two—one—Go! . . . Go! . . . Go! . . . Go!”
One by one, we dropped from the plane like bombs from a B-52 and sped toward the ground at 120 miles an hour. Whether we liked it or not, our lives were now in our own hands. The time we spent rehearsing was past. All that mattered now were the next sixty seconds, three seconds at a time. We had to pay attention; it was life or death important. To pull the rip cord too early would endanger a fellow skydiver and send you well off course. To pull the cord too late was, well, far worse. Time matters in such moments, and my watch remained well within sight.
On another occasion, my wife and I rented a dive boat with a group of friends to view the best underwater spots around the Fijian islands. One morning we were on a deep-water dive to observe several species of sharks. We dove down and down and down, and the light at the surface became dimmer and dimmer. When we reached the bottom of an undersea canyon I glanced at my computer and it read 130 feet. I remember peering up toward the surface and the heavy feeling that I was thirteen stories below. When you’re that far down and you know that you only have a certain amount of air and that once you start to ascend you can only rise a few feet every few seconds, time does not pass indiscriminately. You are very aware that if you ascend too late you will run out of oxygen. Too fast and you’ll get the bends, which can kill you just as quickly. Time matters a lot in such moments, and my flippers didn’t sweep the water once without serious consideration.
It may sound odd, but I think our time off work teaches us a great lesson about our capacity to make the most of our time at work. The two previous examples are from my vacation experiences, but here’s an example we can probably all relate to.
Think about your last vacation. Chances are good that as the date for your departure neared, you became more purposeful about your time. You probably said no to invitations you’d normally say yes to, and you likely became very efficient about finishing tasks, because you knew that if you did, you could fully relax when you stretched out on your chaise lounge.
Time matters before vacations because the return is immediate: if we are very productive before we leave, our freedom won’t be hindered while we’re away.
In this light we seem to have a double standard with our use of time. We squander it in one instance—maybe in most instances while on the job—and we squeeze productivity out of every last second in another, especially right before we’re taking time off. Vacations expose this double standard that, oddly enough, offers us some hope.
BEHIND THE TIMES
It would seem by the way most of us act that time only matters in critical moments or cost-effective moments. In other words, for most of us time only seems to matter:
1. When it has to—like when you’re two miles above the earth or 130 feet below the sea . . . or working with your boss looking over your shoulder, or
2. When it offers immediate rewards—like when you’re about to go on vacation or when you’re vying for a big promotion.
We seem very adept at making our time count in those moments. Yet in all the other moments of our lives—which are predominantly spent on the job—many of us seem to have great difficulty stringing together ten productive minutes. Why is this so?
I don’t think being swamped would be so frustrating if deep down we didn’t sense we could do better—if deep down we didn’t know that we had done better with our time when it really mattered. We probably wouldn’t say things like, “That meeting was a waste of time” if we didn’t know that the week before we had been able to say, “I had the time of my life!”
The fact that we have valued every second of our time at some point in our lives—even if it was just before vacation or just after we jumped out of a plane—proves that we at least have the capacity to make time matter. This knowledge ought to give us some hope. In fact, I believe it is this hope (which is usually subconscious) whispering to us that somewhere, somehow, there is a way to enjoy success at work and freedom in life without getting swamped.
What dulls this hope are the many obstacles that keep us from making time matter on a regular basis. I call the obstacles Time Traps, and most of our lives are full of them.
DON’T SURRENDER
Many of us have given up trying to control our schedules and have accepted an existence in which chaos and catch-up are the status quo. One clever woman summed up her surrender this way:
The clock is my dictator, I shall not rest.
It makes me lie down only when exhausted.
It leads me to deep depression, it hounds my soul.
It leads me in circles of frenzy for activity’s sake.
Even though I run frantically from task to task, I will never get it all done, for my “ideal” is with me.
Deadlines and my need for approval, they drive me.
They demand performance from me, beyond the limits of my schedule.
They anoint my head with migraines, my in-basket over-flows.
Surely fatigue and time pressure shall follow me all the days of my life,
And I will dwell in the bonds of frustration forever.
MARCIA K. HORNOK, PSALM 23, ANTITHESIS
We laugh because we can relate all too well. But who wants to live in the “bonds of frustration forever”?
Think about the last time you enjoyed a wonderful evening with one of your favorite people doing one of your favorite things. Even if it was only a dinner at a great restaurant with a close friend, wasn’t it refreshing and uplifting? Didn’t you feel more alive afterward? We all want more times like that.
Wasting time feels bad, no matter how it is wasted.
Maximizing time feels good, no matter how it is enjoyed. Wasting time feels bad, no matter how it is wasted. Unfortunately, the reality for most of us is that we’re prone to feel bad more often than we feel good. We’re busy and we’re going someplace and it may be a good place to go. The only question is: are we leaving anything (or anyone) behind? Will we get to that place we are going to and then wish we had taken a different path or different companions, or used a different map?
The obvious (and seemingly impossible) resolution is to work in a way that allows us great success on the job and major freedom and pleasure off the job. I’ll admit that sounds like a hugely overambitious task, but I know it can be done, in a much less complicated fashion than you might realize. I see it happen in the lives of hundreds of professionals every year.
Depending on your particular circumstances, there are specific and immediate actions you can take to move your business and life to a place where you are no longer swamped and where you can enjoy more freedom with your time, every day.
In each chapter I will present these proven solutions to you as a resolution to the time trap being discussed. You may not find yourself in every chapter. With such chapters, education is your best strategy. Therefore, in chapters that speak directly to your struggles, dig in and apply the solution as soon as possible. In chapters that don’t quite apply to what you’re going through, safeguard your future days by learning how to avoid the traps being described because they are very common and you are prone to fall into them at some point in your career. In fact, nearly every professional I know has struggled with the eight traps we will discuss.
THE TOUGHEST CHALLENGE WE FACE
Freeing up your time can be a frustrating thing, especially in the working world where much of our time is shared with others who may not value what we do. But we can and should fight for our time—and, though it often feels like an uphill battle, it’s not a lost cause. Consider the victory won by a client of mine named Tim.
He wasn’t being productive with his work time, and he knew it. He was going in early and coming home late and he was tired of missing out, so he came up with a plan. He determined that for three weeks he would tally the amount of time he spent at the fax machine and then multiply his weekly average by the number of weeks he worked in a typical year to come up with an annual total of hours spent faxing. He figured that once he saw how much time he was spending carrying out menial tasks, he would be extra motivated to improve. He wasn’t sure how he would improve, but he knew he would figure out a way if he were provoked.
When the annual tally came in, the result nearly made his eyes pop out of his head. The total was much larger than he had anticipated. He punched the numbers into the calculator one more time. Same result. By his modest estimation, he spent approximately 336 hours per year inserting paper, fishing out jams, gazing at flashing fax numbers, and refaxing misfaxes. Divided into eight-hour increments, this meant he piddled away forty-two work days a year by standing over a fax machine.
The discovery would have been more amusing if it weren’t so telling. The bitter truth was that Tim literally faxed away one-fifth of his work year, and now he understood why he hadn’t been able to take a real vacation in two years.
Many of us may find ourselves in a similar place, wondering how much better things could and should be, how much less stressful, how much more enjoyable, if our days weren’t so stinking busy. And not just with simple tasks like faxing. With other, more important, more critical tasks that cannot just be pushed to the side.
Nearly every professional has a challenge with time. It is the most repetitive and pervasive problem I’ve come across in fifteen years of speaking and training, and it doesn’t just go away. The details of our stories may be different—some of us struggle hourly or daily, and others only now and then—but the results are predictably similar. What didn’t get done today overflows into tomorrow. What was meant for tomorrow gets reshuffled to the next day or the next week or month. To-Do Lists never get done on the day for which they were intended. Post-It Notes lose their stickiness, and the dream of productivity fades into a state of harried and hurried multitasking.
Most of us who are swamped have at some point found ourselves wishing there was a way to drive success on the job while simultaneously enjoying a lot of free time off the job—and most of us have concluded there isn’t. Work success comes at the expense of free time.
I thought this.
But then, like Tim, I began tallying how I spent my time at work, and I realized that most of what I did had little to do with increasing my job success and even less to do with increasing the quality of my life. I realized I was climbing a ladder and climbing as best I knew how, but the view at the top of that ladder wasn’t going to be any better—and maybe it would be worse. This frustrated me at first, and then frustration turned into motivation.
I vowed to make some changes to the way I worked and the way I used my time. I wanted to invest my time, not merely spend it. And I wanted those investments to give me more free time off the job to do whatever I wanted to do, even if it was only an hour more a day.
Initially, some changes worked, some didn’t. But I continued making changes until eventually I figured out a way to be productive with about three-fourths of my work hours. Consequently, I got more done in less time, and this allowed me to spend fewer hours at the office. That was benefit number one. Benefit number two was that I became more successful. I was a mortgage specialist, and because I was more productive I was able to give more clients better service and close more loans in less time. But benefit number three was the most impor-tant: I had a lot more free time off the job—some weeks I had four times more than before. What would you do with twenty more hours of free time each week?
With my free time I learned to scuba dive with my wife, and now we take dive trips each year. I started going to afternoon baseball games with my boys. I began playing more golf and learning to play the piano. I began writing books and seeing friends more often and volunteering at my boys’ school and dining slower and observing longer. And sometimes I reinvested my free time back into my career. The point is that I finally had the choice to do whatever I wanted with my time.
Eventually I got to the place where I could say that the two main tracks of my life—working and living—became one. Today when I work, I am fulfilled because I love what I do. When I’m not working, I am guilt free and unhurried. I am living, and I am enjoying life.
To tell you that getting to this place was an easy undertaking would be patronizing. But to tell you it is not also possible in your life would be a lie. I believe your results could be very similar to Tim’s.
As a result of applying the principles and practices you will read about in the coming chapters, Tim now sells $80 million in home loans every year by working about eighty days. Once a workaholic logging seventy-plus hour weeks, he’s now an enigma in an industry where late nights and long hours are fashionable and seem necessary. Yet Tim holds no secrets or special powers. He’s no different than you or me. He’s an ordinary professional who was once seriously swamped. Then something happened. He came to understand a little something about time, and he let it transform his life.
What he learned and what he is now reaping are what this book is all about: gaining freedom with your time and beginning to live the life you desire, on and off the job.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
If you look at the way most of us carry ourselves throughout life, it would seem that time only matters in critical moments or cost-effective mo...

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