Most of this will be familiar to you if you’re a faithful follower of this blog. It also probably doesn’t make a ton of sense if you don’t because I don’t believe in bullet points or boring slides. Hopefully will have video to follow this.
My daughter recently celebrated her 3rd birthday party and between that and Christmas I should have bought stock in Duracell. Like many parents I began to hunt through the house for batteries only to give up, go purchase some more, and then find the stash from last time once I got home.
Life isn’t so different. How many times have we searched for motivation or energy only to realize that we could have done it all along if we had just started. Taking the analogy further, how many times have you taken the batteries out of a loud toy to avoid a future headache. This is no different from not trying something difficult because you don’t want to deal with it.
A battery left alone in a drawer for long enough time will drain itself and become useless. If you leave your batteries, your skills, your techniques, your specialized talents unused for long enough you’ll lose them. You paid good money for the trainings you’ve gone to, your college education. Your employer and team has invested time and money and effort into you as well.
Don’t wait until your batteries are dead before you use them. Take a change, plug them into that noisy toy with lots of flashing lights and go have some fun.
In my last post about weaknesses I mentioned that one of my weaknesses was that I’m easily distracted. Like the attention span of a mosquito after drinking a meth user’s blood. Following the outline there I know it and acknowledged it as a weakness, now it is time to combat it.
It is easy to be distracted in today’s world: Twitter, Facebook, RSS Feeds, Push notices on your phone, text messages, co-workers asking questions etc. I read a book a while back called Bit Literacy
which speaks about how our minds handle incoming “bits” of data. The conclusion is that the way to handle information overload (distractions) is to manage your incoming streams, and minimize the amount of data coming in and the times you check it.
To cut back on my incoming deluge I unfollowed about 40 twitter folks, dropped about 1/4 of the RSS feeds in my google reader, turned off most of the push notices on my iPhone, and set limited times to check other things on the web.
Additionally there are certain things in any sales job that have to be done but aren’t “sales” jobs. They’re busy work.
I don’t feel comfortable as a salesman not having my email notifications on – don’t want to miss an important timely email – or my phone obviously, but those are distractions that are part of the job. Answering non sales emails, dealing with personal issues, etc. As noted here at SalesMarks.com: scheduling this time allows you to maximize your selling potential by doing the selling while you can.
Time management is a constant battle for me and minimizing distractions can only help towards improving my practices there.
What steps are you taking to minimize a weakness?
