Great news, you control your day! Or do you? Chances are if you’re an entrepreneur or service based professional you’ve developed a calendar that works for you. Mostly. You may have also picked up some habits that harm you more than they help.
Here are a few tips to help you build a schedule with flexibility so you can maximize your performance all day, every day.
Before we discuss our tips, did you know that 70% of businesses will fail? We put together a FREE guide identifying the Top 6 reasons businesses fail and give you actionable steps you can take on every one of these to make sure it’s your competition failing and not you! It’s our free gift to you, you can access it right here.
Secret 1 – Be more self aware
Half of the battle with managing our calendars is recognizing how long it takes us to accomplish something. We’re typically pretty bad at this and deal with performance optimism. It’s the idea that we believe can get more done faster than we actually can. Do yourself a favor. If you want more flexibility in your schedule than add a little extra time for whatever is on your calendar. 60 minute meeting, better make it 70 minutes on the calendar. It’s amazing how much flexibility this will build and additional performance we can get out of the day.
Secret 2 – Respect your time and everyone else’s
If we try to schedule every minute of every day out we create an environment that will be break under stress. What do we mean by that? Well, life happens and to leave no time for life happening is, in our opinion, a very common and very costly mistake we see professionals make all the time. Plan for things to go wrong and we can find ourselves prepared for this and better able to handle it. Leave no room for life to happen and we all know how that can feel. Like a house of cards teetering and then crashing down.
Secret 3 – Set aside time for yourself
We aren’t robots, as much as we’d like to be sometimes. We need rest, we need little moments to recuperate. There was a study done on internal salespeople to see who performed the best. The highest performers were the smokers. No, nicotine doesn’t make better salespeople. But wouldn’t you know it, those smokers took a 5-minute break for themselves every 60-90 minutes. That few minutes for ourselves can make an enormous difference in our performance the other 55 or 85 minutes that follows. If we want to have a flexible schedule that allows for maximum performance this is a great way to ensure we can get it done all day long.
This blog was inspired by our recent podcast interview with Pearce Cucchissi, a coach that previously served as a special forces Army Ranger! You can listen in to our podcast here, or if you prefer you can also check it out on our Youtube channel right here!
If you’re working on being more effective with how you manage your time, we can help! Our unique 2 on 1 coaching marries the expertise of a Doctor of Psychology and mindset coach with the business savvy of a former Fortune 50 external sales Vice President. We specialize in helping entrepreneurs and professionals like you master your time, sales, and confidence, to evolve you to your greatest potential. To learn more about our coaching you can contact us here!
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Not enough time in the day, we get it. Check out our AYOP course, 2x Your Time, right here. We walk through everything from time management and calendar basics to how you can supercharge your days weeks and months through practices and techniques that are grounded in experience and proven by science.