It takes a concerted effort to manage yourself in time – you have to always be thinking to yourself: How do I turn my time into money? What do I do to improve my use of time?

Turning time into money begins with investing some time into thoughtful planning. Over and over I ask what people’s goals and dreams are – the standard knee jerk reaction is to ‘earn a six figure income’ and ‘create more freedom’. How do you turn time and energy into action to produce the results of your goals? What does it take to meet these large goals? What is your plan?

It’s OK to think big, but you have to do big. How will you manage your time to meet these goals? What does it take in time and energy to achieve six figures or $250K a year?

Once again, it all goes back to the basics. In direct sales, network marketing or internet marketing it is learning how to prospect and to sort through the numbers to find the key players you are looking for.

Most people don’t have a clue of how to plan of how to get from point A to Z. Then they don’t factor in how much time it takes to get a return on time investment and the energy it will take to produce the results they are looking to create. Most people spend their time ‘getting ready to get ready’ and procrastinating their life away.

I see people who think they are full time in their enterprise and actually are spare time. They may even quit their jobs to live their dream through the vehicle of free enterprise. I’ve seen people who couldn’t wait to quit their jobs to go full time. Then they actually do quit. Then they devote less time to full time than they did part time, and it’s always fear of the old tapes, the old self sabotage that keeps them from taking the proper action required to create the compounding effect.

You have to learn how to plan to succeed, not plan to fail. The old adage still applies: "When you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail."

Here are some questions to ask yourself when establishing plans:

o Marketing: Who are your potential customers who could benefit from your products, your services, your leadership, your company and your wisdom?

o Who do I desire to attract?

o What are the qualities of that person?

o How many new customers and distributors do you plan to enroll on a monthly average basis for the next two years?

o Training: What kind of training will you provide? Your company’s and your own?

o Do you have a 3-way calling list?

o Are you introducing people into your team?

o Are you providing the books, tapes, coaching, etc.?

o Do you have a training system that is simple and easy?

o Are you a leader?

o Are you teaching people how to use a very simple system?

o Or, are you creating your own?

o Leads: if you don’t have people to talk to you are out of business and you will definitely be ‘getting ready to get ready’

o What is your advertising budget for the next 90 days? Six months?

o Are you in a no budget situation? A mid-budget situation? A make it happen situation?

o Are you using newspapers, warm market, cold market, internet leads, magazines, post cards?

o Are you writing your own ads? How do you learn to do copywriting? Are you figuring it out? Are you looking in magazines, e.g. USA Today? Are you seeing what other people are doing?

o Are you creating leads through the Chamber of Commerce, leads clubs, etc.?

o Tools: What tools are you using when it comes to marketing?

o What tools are you using when it comes to prospecting?

o There are great new telephone headsets, computers, voicemail blasts, fax on demand, digital cameras, printers, laptops to utilize as time savers

o Do you have a secretary or assistant if you can afford that?

o Are you using cell phones, emails, etc.?

When building your business, it is essential that the bulk of your time is spent on revenue producing activity. These are the most important goals that produce results and the most important items on your ‘to do’ list. 80% of your effectiveness will come from achieving 20% of your goals. When you set goals and priorities and focus on the most important goals, you are now focusing on the bottom line – which is getting results through prospecting. This is when time becomes money. The more efficient you become, the more money you will get for your time and the sooner you will own your freedom.

I have found a very important fact about time usage: we tend to spend most of our time in recurring patterns of behaviour which do not produce results or money, without giving much thought to them – they are called ‘old habits’. Some are time savers while most are time wasters – TV, gossip, politics, the ‘he said, she said’ syndrome, getting ready to get ready, procrastinating. This type of activity steals time from your life.

The key at becoming efficient at time usage is to identify the time wasting habits and replace them with habits that will assist you in turning time into money.

You also have to find out how you spend your time. Time will either promote you or expose you. Find out how you are spending your time. I ask my clients over and over what they did 2 days ago – very, very few can recall on the hour what they did except maybe when they got up and when they went to bed.

Time management is an area that almost everyone has to improve on and a great place to start is to keep a time log for one week. This is a very simple task and one that will be quite eye opening for everyone when done properly and honestly. It shocks most people how unproductive they are in their time. On a daily basis, find out exactly how many people you talk to. How many decisions you collected? How many no’s you received? How many no’s you gave? How many yeses you collected?

Your plan has to be spent on revenue producing activity. Write down every activity you engage in and how long it takes that you devote to your enterprise. Keep track of how many messages you left. How many people did you actually talk to? How many people did you disqualify? How many no’s and yeses did you get? How much time was devoted to interviewing? Listening to CD’s? Reading books? Did you attend any workshops? Seminars? How many successful people did you interview?

Keep track and separate the time and write this all down for 7 consecutive days. Then keep track of TV time, time spent reading magazines, movies you watch, etc. How much phone interviewing did you conduct? How much face to face interviewing did you conduct? Any time you do something, how much was spent on paperwork? (Paper shuffling, etc.) Finding how your time was actually spent is a real eye opener. We don’t realize the huge amount of time that is being spent on frivolous activities. Most of our time is not spent on achieving our goals we set out to gain.

We don’t realize we don’t know anything about managing ourselves in time we set aside. Most of us waste about half of our time and even good time managers waste about 2 hours a day on average circumstances.

Once you have completed a log on how you spend your time, write down the following questions:

What were my three greatest time wasters?

How much time is being spent on repeated interruptions? Who or what is responsible for them? How can they be minimalized?

What do I do consistently that I think is urgent but is really unimportant?

What are the least and most productive times of each day?

Whom should I spend more time with?

Whom should I spend less time with?

What activities should I be devoting more time to?

What activities should I be spending less time on?

What patterns and bad habits are causing me to waste time?

Am I trying to do too much so I can confuse myself so that I don’t create any results?

Am I procrastinating and why?

Taking an inventory of ourselves in answering these questions honestly becomes the basis for setting up our strategic plan on how we intend to manage ourselves in time in our own enterprise.