Christopher V. Flett

In the last two weeks, I’ve been in five provinces, two states, and flown about 15,000 miles. Aside from some bumpy flights, I was able to get some time to work on overdue projects. While others were watching movies beside me with their feet up, or listening to their iPods, I was billing. Why? Because travel to me isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity. I plot out my work day and set aside a certain amount of work I want to accomplish. I’m not always overly enthused to have to do the work, but I know what gets me busy keeps me busy.

In recent weeks, I’ve had conversations with a variety of people that have notices that the economy has picked up. Buyer confidence is coming back, yet they find themselves off their profit model. How can this be? They are good at what they do. They have an obvious market they service. And their market has more money now than it did last year. When the explain this inexplainable situation, I ask to see their daytimer. At first there is a look of shock and then it is quickly replaced with defensiveness. “Why would you want to look at my schedule?” I reply, “I can tell you in 10 seconds why you are off model.

The truth is, we can busy ourselves with things. Getting groceries, surfing the web, paying bills, and other tasks, but none of these make you money. They cost you money. You can have a long lunch with your friend, call your mom, or get your car washed, but if it is happening between 9AM and 5PM, you are pissing away profitable hours of the day. One woman in Seattle showed me her daytimer and after looking at 20 tasks. Here is a sample of what was on the list:

• Pick up dry cleaning
• Make a Costco shopping list
• Pay the house taxes
• Check into better cell phone plans
• Find week-long camps for the kids this summer
• Get the car insurance papers in
• Plan parents anniversary party
• Follow up with Beth (prospect)
• Find out when the Alumni party is for Seattle University
• Get some groceries for the weekend
• Make up the bedrooms for the grandparents visit

As you can see, only one of the tasks was business related (in bold).

>Here is an example of my average week (includes meetings with clients/partners). The spaces you’ll see in the list is the space that I put in place to think about projects (again pro-business development).

Have a look at your calendar and determine where your time is going. Is it spent making money? Of 40 hours, how many were actual billing hours or hours building billing opportunities? What gets in your way? Once you know, you can’t un-know.

Cheers,

C/