Tag Productivity

882 Hours to Succeed

Steve Keating 1 Comment

I remember several years ago a player on the Minnesota Timberwolves was quoted as saying that “you can’t really expect someone to give a 100% effort for 48 minutes of each game for all 82 regular season games.” 

 

Well…I kind of expected it. Especially considering he was making around $20 million dollars a year. But I did get his point, it’s hard to go full out all the time. No one can be at peak performance all the time. Too much “stuff” gets in the way. 

 

But here’s the thing, very successful people find a way to keep that “stuff” to a minimum. 

 

If you’re a professional salesperson as of May 28, 2019 you have only 882 selling hours, or what I call “money hours”  remaining this year. 882 hours to make or break your year. Here’s how I got to the 882 number. Depending on your industry, depending on how many vacation days you take, depending on what you consider holidays and depending how many money hours you have in a day your number may vary but not by much. 

 

By my calculations there are approximately 147 selling days left in 2019 as of May 28th. 

 

Money hours are the hours that you can be face-to-face selling to customers and prospects. You can work 12 hour days but if you’re in a business to business selling role then it is unlikely you have more then 6 hours a day to actually be face-to-face with the people who make the purchase decisions for your product or service. Which of the 24 hours you have in a day are your money hours will vary by industry but 6 hours is the limit if you are a highly productive professional. 

 

That gets you to the 882 number. 

 

If you’re reading this during your money hours then you have less!

 

How you use your 882 hours will determine your level of success. A trip to the post office during money hours is incredibly expensive. It matters little who picks up the check for that lunch with your old friend, if that lunch is during your 882 hours it could cost you a small fortune. 

 

I get that dropping the kids off at school and getting that last hug before you start your day is a priceless gift. I just want you to understand it’s cost in terms of money hours if you’re doing it during your 882 hours. It’s a choice I hope you’re blessed enough to be able to make, I also hope it’s a well informed choice for you.

 

If you’re knocking off for the day at noon for an afternoon of golf that’s a choice too. If you happen to win 20 bucks from your golfing buddies you may want to hold off on celebrating. If that round of golf was happening during your 882 money hours it might be the most expensive round of golf you’ll ever play. 

 

As of May 28th there are 5208 hours left in the year but only 882 of them are money hours. That’s less than 20% of your remaining 2019 hours. How will you invest those hours? Will you let “stuff” get in the way of your success? Will you accept the false “fact” that you can’t be at the top of your game for every one of those 882 hours? 


Or will you do what top performing professionals do and develop a plan to maximize your use of those 882 hours? I strongly encourage you to develop your plan as soon as possible and here’s one final suggestion, don’t use money hours to do it.


Don’t Let Waiting be a Waste

Steve Keating 4 Comments

People around the world are waiting. We wait for meetings, we wait for appointments, we wait at airports, we wait for people who are late, we wait and we wait some more. 

 

Many people think “wait time” is wasted time. Well it’s only wasted if you allow it to be. There are a ton of productive things you can do when you’re waiting. That’s true no matter what you’re waiting for or how long you’re waiting. 

 

Most people waste waiting time because it’s “only” a few minutes. Well, a few minutes here and a few minutes there and pretty soon you’ve wasted more time than successful people can afford to waste. Let’s look at the numbers, these are accurate for those of us in the United States but they are representative for anyone. 

 

According to a Timex survey, Americans wait:

  • on average of 20 minutes a day for the bus or train
  • 32 minutes whenever they visit a doctor
  • 28 minutes in security lines whenever they travel
  • 21 minutes for a significant other to get ready to go out
  • 13 hours annually waiting on hold for a customer service
  • 38 hours each year waiting in traffic
  • those living in big cities wait in traffic more than 50 hours annually

People spend approximately 6 months of their lives waiting in line for things, it means like 3 days a year of lining up. The average person spends about 43 days on hold with automated customer service in a lifetime. Those who take the bus or train will wait about 27 days of their lives waiting around on the platform or at the bus stop.

 

And what about our Phones?

  • We spend 23 days a year on our phones
  • 90 minutes a day
  • 9 years of the average person’s life

By the way “Phone” means to call somebody but that is now the sixth most used feature on a smartphone.

 

I don’t know about you but I don’t want to waste hours and hours of every year waiting. So let’s see if we can make waiting time a little more useful. Here’s a few ideas on how we might do that. 

 

Do Nothing. Doing nothing is one of the things I’m best at. I’ll put my “doing nothing” skills up against anyone. Doing nothing is also one of my most productive activities. While doing nothing I’m thinking about all kinds of generally worthless stuff but mostly I’m in my own world, recharging my batteries so I’m more productive when my wait is over. It’s okay, better than okay actually, to do nothing from time to time. We need to shut down once in a while in order to have peak performance time during the day. If you never shut down it’s likely you also never have truly peak performance either. 

 

Call Someone. A whole bunch of the time we spend on our smartphones is unproductive time. You can change that by increasing the time you’re using your phone to call someone. Perhaps it’s someone you’ve been meaning to call for a long time. Maybe it’s a customer you’ve been putting off calling because your relationship is a bit strained. Maybe, just maybe it’s a call to someone you care about to tell them you’re thinking of them. (you might make their day and to me, that’s a very productive thing)

 

Read. The most successful people I know always have a good book with them for those unexpected waiting times. It might be a paper book or it might be on a Kindle but they have something to read to help them learn. If you’re a road warrior then this could make a world a difference for you. Check out audio books you can listen to in the car on on your phone when you find yourself “stuck” someplace you didn’t intend to be. 

 

Meet someone new. By definition if you’re in line there is someone either in front of you or behind you, likely both. That person may have an idea that could change your life, or better yet, you may have an idea that could change theirs. Get out of that success limiting comfort zone of yours and be that strange person who will talk to anyone. It’s uncommon to find people with enough confidence to talk to anyone anywhere but you will never have uncommon results by doing common things. 

 

Adjust your plan. You had a 10:00am doctors appointment and upon arriving a few minutes early you’re told the doctor is running a few minutes late. In “doctor speak” that likely means 30 minutes or even more. Use that precious time to adjust your plan for the day. Reprioritize what you’re going to accomplish with the rest of your day. Instead of stressing over what won’t get done decide what doesn’t NEED to be done and take a bit of stress out of your waiting time. The one problem that most people have with adjusting their plan during waiting time is that they didn’t have a plan to begin with. If you’re most people then do yourself a favor and make a plan before you leave home every day. Even if your day doesn’t go according to plan that planning time will be the most productive time of your day. 


“Waste not want not” is a very common saying. I prefer “wait not want not.” It’s far less common and far more productive.  

 

 

Do You Know The People You Lead?

Steve Keating 9 Comments

One of the more critical responsibilities of leadership is making sure you have the right people in the right positions. Leaders who don’t understand this fail, and they take their people right into the pit of failure with them. 

 

You can have one of the most talented people in the world on your team but if you don’t put them in a position to succeed then their chance at success goes way way down. 

 

Albert Einstein said that “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by it’s ability to climb a tree, it will spend it’s whole life believing that it is stupid.” So it is with people too! 

 

You may not see all of your people as geniuses but each of them indeed has their own set of strengths and as a leader it is incumbent upon you to make certain that those strengths are put to good use. Doing so is good for both your organization AND your people.

 

One of the challenges many leaders face is that they simply do not truly know their people. They don’t know their motivations, they don’t know their goals (or if they even have any) and they don’t know what challenges their people are facing in their own lives. Too many leaders are almost completely unaware of the totality of their people’s strengths and that results in people locked into jobs that are often far below their abilities. 

 

No one wins when that happens. Underutilized people become unmotivated people in the blink of an eye. If you don’t know what you have in your people you’ll likely never get it out of them.

 

If you’re a leader and you’re not conducting regular “strength inventories” with your people then you run the risk of demotivating the very people you need to be as engaged as possible. Conducting these types of inventories requires you to interact with your people. It makes you get out from behind that Great Wall known as a desk and meet your people on their terms. Indeed, the huge side benefit of conducting “strength inventories” is you’re also taking the pulse of your organization. 

 

Do not believe your organization is so big that you as the leader can’t do this. You may leave some of the inventories to your HR group or other leaders but every leader in your organization should be doing at least some inventories of their own people. 


Not providing your people the opportunity to fully utilize their skills is one of the fastest ways to lose them. If you’re lucky once you lose them they will move on to greener pastures, if you’re not lucky then you’ll lose them and they will stay in your organization.


The Importance of Fun

Steve Keating 1 Comment

I’m a big believer in having fun. It doesn’t really make a difference where I am or who I’m with, fun is always better than no fun. 

 

Fun is a choice. 

 

That’s why even when work is really “bad,” or someone has disappointed me, or I’m really really busy, fun is a priority for me. It should be for you as well, along with the people you lead. 

 

I remember visiting a customer several years ago and the moment I walked in the door I could feel it…this was not a fun place. It was as quiet as a library filled with people who looked liked they were attending a funeral. 

 

I tactfully asked the owners about the “atmosphere” of their workplace and they explained to me that “this is a workplace” not a place where you’re supposed to be enjoying yourself. Now here’s the thing, these were very smart business owners in almost every way. They were constantly battling low productivity and output from their people and they made the all too common mistake of blaming their employees for that. 

 

Their “solution” to that problem was to simply tighten the screws on their employees. It was actually exactly the opposite of what they should have done. 

 

By the way, I was more than a little taken aback by their constant reference to the people who worked for them as “employees.” While I’m not big into buzzwords like “team members” “guest relations specialists” or even Disney’s famous “cast members,” I get why businesses use them. They use them to change a mindset.

 

The term “employees” is a bit technical and in practice dehumanizing. If you think of the people you’re supposed to be leading solely as employees and not real people then your attitude is going to show itself in how you speak with them and in how you treat them. It might even cause you to think about banning fun in your workplace. 

 

Anyway, back to fun. 

 

Fun as it turns out is a pretty effective business strategy. It increases productivity. People who enjoy what they do for a living and the people who they do it with will outperform people who don’t enjoy what they do. They will outperform them in every circumstance! 

 

As a leader it is better if you build the fun into your organization’s environment. If however you’re not the fun type don’t worry about it, just stay out of your people’s way and they will likely figure out the fun part on their own. 

 

Now, for those of you like me who believe that fun at work is important here’s something else that’s really important. 

 

Getting the work done. 

 

You can have fun before the work gets done, you can have fun after the work gets done or you can have fun while the work is getting done but I don’t care how authentic your leader is, the fun is going to stop pretty darn quick if the work isn’t getting done. 

 

I insist on having fun and you should too. But I have an ethical and morale obligation to earn the money I’m paid by getting the work done and so do you. I may be a little weird and I’m certainly blessed in this regard but for me, getting the work done is in itself a whole lotta fun. 

 

There is a minor league baseball team in my hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota called the Saint Paul Saints. It’s owned by Bill Veeck and Bill Murray…yes that Bill Murray. There are all kinds of shenanigans going on at their baseball games, from haircuts in the stands and all kinds of contests and skits on the field. They even play a little baseball too. The philosophy  of these two Bills is that “Fun is Good,” Bill Veeck even wrote a book by that title. 


I entirely endorse their philosophy, I hope you do too! 


30 Seconds to Success

Steve Keating 6 Comments

I’ve known many a procrastinator through the years (myself included) but I’ve known few people who were procrastinators by choice. They were all mostly procrastinators by chance.

 

Most procrastinators have more to do than they know how. They almost get paralyzed trying to figure out where to begin and the result is often that they just don’t…begin that is. They just don’t begin. They don’t get much finished because they don’t get much started. 

 

This much is certain, you will never finish what you never begin. 

 

So the first step to overcoming procrastination is to simply begin. But the question remains; where to begin.

 

Here is one piece of advice I received years ago that has really helped me overcome my procrastination tendencies: If you have something to do, anything to do, and it takes 30 seconds or less to do it then do it now, RIGHT NOW.

 

Now the best procrastinators out there will tell you that you can’t get anything done in 30 seconds or less. They would be wrong about that. 

 

30 seconds is actually quite a long time. 

 

In 30 seconds you can make a prioritized task list of the things you must accomplish today in order to be productive. Then you’ll know exactly where to begin.

 

In 30 seconds you can answer an email. If you don’t believe that then time yourself when answering a few. You’ll find that most, the vast majority in fact, take less than 30 seconds. Most people read the same email several times before finally answering it. That’s called procrastination and it’s a waste of time.

 

In 30 seconds you can delete about 60 emails from last year that you never did get around to answering. 

 

You can respond to several text messages or send one to someone, like mom or dad, that you’ve been meaning to send for a while. 

 

In 30 seconds you can set a meaningful goal. 

 

In 30 seconds you can pay a bill online.

 

In 30 seconds you can say thank you to someone you’ve intended to thank for days.

 

In 30 seconds you could pay someone a sincere compliment. 

 

In 30 seconds you could make a decision that changes your entire life.

 

You can do a lot in 30 seconds if you choose to be productive instead of busy and overwhelmed. 

 

It should take you substantially less than 30 seconds to decide which one will lead you towards greater success.


The Difference Between Urgent and Important

Steve Keating 1 Comment

In my last post I discussed the fact that leaders understand the difference between need to do and nice to do activities.

Effective leaders also understand the huge difference between what’s merely urgent and what’s truly important. Those urgent things are frequently less productive, and often matter far less, than the important things. 

President Eisenhower said, “The urgent is seldom important and the important is seldom urgent.” That statement led Charles Hummel to publish a small booklet in the 1960’s entitled, The Tyranny of the Urgent. 

In it, he described the tension that exists between the urgent and important things in life and the fact that far too often, the urgent wins. Sometimes the urgent things are also important but very often they are not.

So what about you? Are you running around doing urgent things all day or are the things you do truly important? If you’re like most people, yes sadly most people get caught in the trap of urgency, you’re in such a rush to “get it done” that you don’t really stop to separate, or prioritize the urgent things from the important things. 

What’s more important, a conversation about school, life or their choice of friends with your kids or an empty email inbox? The emails may be urgent but the kids are important, for most of us, our kids are by far the most important aspect of our lives. Yet we stay at the office that extra hour to try and “get through a few more emails” while our kids, those incredibly, unbelievably, positively, absolutely important kids are waiting at home. 

If that happens to you then you are a victim of the tyranny of the urgent. 

If that happens to you then I’ll also bet you just use that always popular time excuse. You think that saying “I just don’t have the time” let’s you off the hook. You’re not responsible, it’s not your fault, it’s just “stuff” getting in the way of you doing what’s really important. 

Wrong! 

You’re not going to like hearing this but the fact is, you don’t suffer from a lack of time, you suffer from a lack of prioritization skills. Or, you just never slow down enough to truly prioritize. The challenge for many of us is that we just don’t often invest the time to consider what really matters to us, we just rush through life doing what’s put in front of us without considering what’s left behind.

I understand that you likely can’t get everything done that you would like to; that’s just a fact of life in the world in which most of us live. But that’s not an excuse for not prioritizing, it’s the very reason you should. 

At some point you’re just going to have to stop the madness, shut down the distractions and make yourself ignore the “urgent” stuff long enough to truly consider what’s important in your life. Just stop once in a while to determine if you’re running your life or if your life is running you. 

You may not be able to get it all done but you sure as heck can get the truly important stuff done, you just have to be aware of what’s really important in your life. 

 

What Not To Do

Steve Keating 9 Comments

Strategic thinking has as much to do with deciding what not to do as it does with deciding what to do. I’ve sat in literally hundreds of planning meetings where the discussion centered on what we should do to increase our success. I’ve seldom, if ever, heard a discussion on things we should not do. 

The reality is that what you don’t do can contribute as much to your success as what you choose to do. When we do not strategize about the “don’t do” activities we end of doing them without any consideration of the cost. 

Many of the costs are “opportunity costs;” when we are doing things we shouldn’t be doing we’re not doing things that we should. It’s at that point we use the always popular “time” excuse as in “we just don’t the time to do everything we planned to do.” 

Well, you might if you stopped doing the things you didn’t plan to do. 

Authentic leaders understand the difference between the “need to do” things and the “nice to do” things and they work hard at NOT doing the nice to do until the need to do things are complete. 

The real challenge is, and this is a big one for me, the “nice to do” things are usually easier and more fun to do than the “need to do.” Because the “nice” things are indeed nice we can fool ourselves into thinking we’ve accomplished something when in fact we’ve skipped over something we had planned to do.  

While doing the “nice” thing might even be productive in some way truly effective leaders know it probably wasn’t the most productive thing they could have done. 

If you want to improve your productivity, and your level of success then stop yourself every now and then and ask, “is this the most productive thing I could be doing at this very moment?” If you’re like me you will likely be shocked at how often your answer is NO! 

The answer to that question may not always tell you what to do but it will certainly help you understand what not to do.