Page 173 - The UnCaptive Agent

146 THE UNCAPTIVE AGENT

lot of hours. If you have come to your new role with a
great system of time management, you’ll be way ahead
of the game. But even if you’re not an expert in this
area, mastering the skill of managing your time will be
critical to your success.

Managing Your Scarcest Resource – Time

The first step in effective time management is taking
the time to plan your time. Every week has one hundred
sixty-eight hours in it. How many of those hours can
you devote to working? My suggestion is that in the
beginning you will do well if you can devote at least
half of those hours to work. And I will observe to you
that successful businesspeople always, for their entire
careers, spend more hours in any given week working
than doing practically anything else other than sleeping.
Now that you have a reasonable amount of time set
aside to devote to your business—say sixty to eighty
hours—how will you spend it? You can’t spend all your
time prospecting and selling. You must spend some
time on doing proposals. You must meet with insurance
companies. You must work on marketing and other tasks.
Each week, at the beginning of the week, make a list
each week of that week’s priorities and estimate how
much time they will take. Having done that, chunk the
activities so that you are doing as many similar types
of things as possible in the same time period. This will
make it easier to get into a flow state, and you will be
more effective. For example, if you need to devote fifteen
hours this week to prospecting, consider setting aside
three five-hour chunks of time to get that accomplished.
Now you have a day-by-day and hour-by-hour plan
for your time. Of course, it will all blow up during the
week as opportunity or crises develop! But you will find