How often do we hear friends and colleagues brag about their ability to multitask their day? Meetings, emails, laundry, dinner, everything at once – amazing. But more often than not we find that multitasking merely offers us the opportunity to be mediocre at many things simultaneously, rather than great at one task at a time.

I came across a recent article on CNBC that did an excellent job of providing a metaphor for the concept of multitasking and how it negatively affects all the work we do. Think about time like money. You can't buy a $20 shirt and $20 pair of pants with the same $20 bill. Each of them costs $20, and there's no way to magically condense that. We seem to accept that basic truth for money, but somehow think that we can skirt around it as it relates to time. But that's just silly. If two projects each require about two hours of focused concentration, we can't use the same two hours to do them both." At least not well.

So every day we have a limited amount of time to dedicate to various activities, both work and personal. Can we really maximize the effectiveness of our time at the gym when we're taking client calls during our work out? Can we really be the most effective when prospecting if we've allocated the same time slot to responding to emails?

One recommendation this article makes is that in the same way you would get a handle on your personal finances, so to should we our time. So first things first, we need to put pen to paper and track how we budget our time every day. The author shares that an online app called Toggl is a great tool for helping you get started in assessing your time budget, apparently very helpful and works well on both an app and the computer, so might be worth checking out. From his standpoint, just like tracking your finances or your diet, one of the greatest benefits to going down this path is actually having to now face the music on how we really spend our time. Having to face the fact that only 10 minutes into your prospecting calls you're already logged on to facebook and Instagram or looking up a new recipe for dinner, you really start to see just how much multitasking really costs us on a day-to-day basis.

My sales director has emphasized implementing a system for blocking our time and working strictly within the parameters set since his first day. The impact of doing so was apparent immediately, and the rest of the office has expressed similar results. Give it a try, let us know if it brings you as much value as it has for me.  

This is YOUR Shot, and we value your feedback on how we can improve it to add just a bit more depth to your sales presentation. A recurring theme that has come up is the frequency of episodes. We are reminded as to how potent and valuable the content is, but with it coming out on a daily basis it goes against the "bite size" concept we set out to provide. That being said, again, we hear you and value your opinion, so we will be condensing Your Shot to three highly concentrated days of mental caffeine on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. We thank you again for your viewership, and look forward to continue serving Your Morning Shot to get your days started with a bang.

 

The views of this blog, podcast, and on this site in general are solely those of the authors, Matt Weaver (NMLS-175651) and Zack Lewis, and do not express the views or opinions of Finance of America Mortgage.