'If I Just Had More Time Each Day ...'

Do you wish you had more time to get more done? What could you do if you could squeeze an extra hour of productivity into your day? How much more could you accomplish? Without question, everybody reading this could get more done with more time. So here’s Catch number 1, or the choice you’ll have to make. If you need an extra hour to get more done, you’ll either have to spend an extra hour at work or learn how to prioritize what you do, so you can be more productive.

My guess is everyone would choose to get more done without working longer. That’s great, and to accomplish that, the challenge for everyone — you, me and everyone else — is to learn how to manage your time throughout the day, even with all of the fire drills you have every day.

Catch number 2: There is no such thing as “time management." In real life, you can’t manage time; we all have to learn to manage our activities that use up our time every day. We have to learn to better manage our activities each day so when the day is over, we’ve accomplished the most important things we needed to get done in sales or sales management to sell more, gross more, drive more floor traffic, slow down turnover, build our repeat business and our dozen other business priorities.

Here are two quick stats as a baseline on how we’re doing now:

• The average sales manager wastes 25% of his or her day doing things that are non-productive. No doubt we’re all busy all day. This stat just means we spend a lot of time doing stuff that comes up instead of some of the more important things we need to get done.

• The average sales manager only spends 18% of their day working with their salespeople (including working deals).

Our role as sales managers means we’re supposed to devote our day to doing something to sell a vehicle, raise the gross or build the business. We can’t do that very well if we only manage and work with our salespeople for a fraction of our day. The good news, however, is that while you can’t manage your time, you can quickly learn to manage the activities that take up your time. And when you manage your activities, you get control of your day and you can plan what you want to happen instead of just reacting to what happens around you.

The real trick is learning how to prioritize what you do each day and learning how to walk away from non-productive tasks, people and situations that are not mission-critical. Can almost anybody interrupt what you’re doing? Do salespeople, other managers, wholesalers and vendors hang around while you’re trying to work deals or prepare your daily training? Can ad people, wholesalers, factory guys, bankers and even strangers walk in any time they want?

Especially in smaller dealerships, you can get managers to drop the responsibilities of running a multimillion dollar business just to talk. I didn’t say every interruption was a bad thing — just that managers in the car business are so accessible. With time management, there is a trade-off for everything you do. If you let other people continually interrupt you for their benefit — you put off the important activities you need to get done to make your dealership more successful. Like a traffic jam, everything you don’t do that needs to get done pushes another activity further down your list. Pretty soon, everything is backed up and the fire drill is on.

A few tips for minimizing these distractions:

• Business Partners: Schedule wholesalers, lenders, dealer trades and all those other vendors for a specific time of day and stick to it! You decide when you’re available. Have them come in at 7 a.m. on Monday or at 6 p.m. Wednesday or on Saturday morning before 9 a.m. Don’t worry, if they want your business, they’ll be flexible.

• Customers: The only people you can’t schedule are customers. If they have a problem, stop wasting time handing them off to a salesperson or anyone else who can’t solve the problem. Don’t put it off, save time and solve it now. If you can’t personally take care of the problem, take them to the right person, explain the situation, then leave and get back to what you were doing.

• Folks just hanging around: The hardest decision I had to make when I decided to turn pro was to “go to work to work.” It was hard because I had to let the other managers and salespeople know they couldn’t stop by to waste my time just because they had nothing to do for a few minutes. What’s the big deal about a five-minute interruption? With 15 salespeople and managers, if everyone interrupts everyone for just five minutes each day, on the surface, it’s just five minutes times 15 people, or 1 hour and 15 minutes wasted. But there’s a multiplier in there, because it takes twice as long to get your mind back into the task you were working on before you were interrupted.

One of the best tips I ever got on “activity management” was to tape this saying everywhere in your office to remind you of what you’re doing and trying to accomplish. In fact, this is the same tip I give salespeople. Just write this down and make sure you read it often: “Am I doing the most productive thing possible right now?” When you notice you aren’t, turn and walk away. The challenge is to keep the "main thing," the main thing all day.