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Top Five Time Management Mistakes
Author: Dr. Donald E. Wetmore
Customer complaints are never easy for small businesses. Many small businesses are run from a staff of five or less, which means a lot of heart, soul, and pure sweat goes into every order or service. So how can small businesses handle customer complaints without taking them personally?
The first step towards dealing with customer complaints is to acknowledge how the complaints make you feel. Once those feelings are acknowledged, it will be easier to look at the customer complaints from an objective standpoint. After all, customer complaints immediately put you, the small business owner, on the defense which makes it difficult to be objective. Customer complaints can also make you feel as though you have failed in some way. And finally, customer complaints can leave you feeling quite frustrated.
In my thirty years as a time management speaker and consultant, I have observed a lot of what we can and should not do to increase our daily results. Time management is not necessarily working “harder”, but rather, “smarter”.
And to accomplish significantly more in our days, we need not increase our efforts. As an example, in a horse race, the first horse may earn a $50,000 purse and the second horse may earn a $25,000 purse. The first horse gets twice as much money as the second horse, not because it ran twice as far or twice as fast. It was only a “nose ahead” of the competition.
So it is with our daily results. We need not run twice as fast or put in twice the effort to significantly increase our daily success. We only need to be a “nose ahead” of where we already are. We are all productive in our days. We would not survive the demands of this world if we were not. The real challenge is how much more productive can we become?
A lot of our time management has to do more with what we are not doing rather than what we are doing. Sometimes our mistakes and omissions will keep us from running at a full pace.
Here are the top five time management mistakes we should all avoid to help us to increase our daily success both on and off the job, in less time and with less stress.
Start your day without a plan of action
You will begin your day by responding to the loudest voice (the squeaky wheel gets the grease) and spend it in a defensive mode, responding to other people’s and events’ demands. The tail will wag the dog.
If there is a void of leadership in your life, someone will fill that void, not that others are bad people, but others will take all of your time if you let them. You will have worked hard but may not have done enough of right things. Time management is not doing the wrong things quicker. That just gets us nowhere faster, it is about doing the right things.Get out of balance in your life
Our lives are made up of seven vital areas: health, family, financial, intellectual, social, professional, and spiritual. We will not necessarily spend time every day in each of these areas or equal amounts of time in each area. But, if in the long run, we spend a sufficient quantity and quality of time in each area, our lives will be in balance.
If we neglect any one area, never mind two or three, we will eventually sabotage our success. Much like a table, if one leg is longer than the rest, it will make the entire table wobbly. If we don’t take time for health, our family life and social life are hurt. If our financial area is out of balance, we will not be able to focus adequately on our professional goals, etc.Work with a messy desk or work area
Studies have shown that the person who works with a messy desk spends, on average, one and a half hours per day looking for things or being distracted by things. That’s seven and a half hours per week.
It’s not a solid block of an hour and a half, but a minute here and a minute there that steals our time. It's like a leaky hot water faucet that drips, drips, drips. It doesn’t seem like a major loss, but at the end the day, we’re dumping gallons of hot water down the drain―water that we are paying to heat.Don’t get enough sleep
Studies show that nearly 75% of us complain on a regular basis, throughout the entire day, that we are flat-out tired. The problem is that most people get the quantity of sleep they need but they lack the quality of sleep.
Their days are filled with so much stress that they simply cannot rest peacefully. They are out of control. They work harder but not smarter and that makes it difficult to get a full night’s sleep.
If you plan your day, then work your plan, you will get more done, feel a higher sense of accomplishment, experience less stress and enjoy a more restful night’s sleep.Don’t take a lunch break
Many do not take a lunch break. Instead they work through their lunches hoping that it will give them more time to produce the results they were looking for. But studies have shown it may work just the opposite. After doing what we do for several hours, we start to “dull out”. Sure, we can work through lunch and be productive, but that is not the issue. The issue is “how much more” productive we can be.
A lunch break, even a short fifteen-minute break, gives us a chance to get our batteries charged up again. A break allows us to more effectively handle the afternoon’s challenges. We are then less likely to procrastinate a few of those difficult tasks that, in the long run, will make a positive difference in our productivity and give us the results we were looking for.
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