Avoiding the Tyranny of the Urgent

"Fail to plan, plan to fail." How much of your day do you spend reacting instead of acting? Selling and leading your sales team with a plan improves your ability to achieve expected results. You are responsible for having processes in place that produce repeatable economic results.

You can classify all your daily tasks into 4 categories:

• Important and Urgent-crisis of the day
• Important but Not Urgent-critical to long-term success
• Not Important but Urgent-important for someone else
• Not Important and Not Urgent-trivial distractions

How would the results of your day change if you spent more of your time tending to projects that were classified as Important but Not Urgent?
Review your daily tasks and group them into the following quadrants:

If you spent more time in quadrant 2, wouldn't you be able to produce some true, long-term results for your sales organization? You need to commit to establishing priorities and enhancing productivity. Specify activities you will stop doing to increase your productivity and actions you will take to gain better results. Have a clear vision of your expected results

How to Prioritize

1. Prepare a to-do list.
2. Include quadrant 2 activities.
3. Arrange the list in order of importance to you, both personall and professionally. Take into consideration how certain items on your list might affect others (for example, someone might need someone from you in order to do his or her job. If so, you can't neglect that responsibility).
4. Develop deadlines for each item. Create deadlines for quadrant 2 activities.
5. Examine the consequences for failing to accomplish a certain task by the deadline.
6. Identify the rewards of completing the task on time.

What tricks have you developed to help prioritize your time? Post your answers here so we can all have more tools to use!

The Dale Carnegie Course provides us with tools to help us more effeciently manage our time.

Succeeding and Thriving Through Organizational Change

One of the challenging results of organizational change is that it can leave you feeling fatigued. All of your efforts are focused on new tasks, responsibilities, and relationships. Because of this, you need to look for strategies to maintain and even increase your personal energy during times of change.

• Create a Vision: Nothing is more personally motivating than creating a compelling vision. Visualize yourself succeeding as a result of the change. Imagine the benefits of growing as a result of the change -- creating new opportunities, building a more exciting and dynamic future, and opening up new opportunities for success.
• List Opportunities: What are the opportunities presented by the change? Make a list of all the ways that you can grow, add new skills, meet influential people, and add valuable experience to your resumes.
• Create Networks: It's difficult to create energy in a vacuum. Most people need the stimulation of other individuals and their ideas, input, feedback, and support. Times of change offer an opportunity to add to the network of people who understand you, believe in you, and are willing to help you move forward.
• Build Bridges: Organizational change normally involves the establishment of new relationships. Sometimes you resist these new relationships, especially if it involves a new supervisor or a perceived loss of your authority. Instead of retreating from the new relationship, draw energy from it by embracing it and building bridges between yourself and people you encounter. Meeting new people is usually highly energizing because it gives you the opportunity to find commonalities in your values and goals and in the creativity of collaboration.

How have you handled changes within your orgainzation? Let us know so we all have more tools to use as our organizations continue to change.

The Dale Carnegie Course provides us with tools to help us more gracefully and graciously handle the organizational changes that continue to happen.