This is an important discipline to build as a sales leader, especially since there’s no end to the list of internal meetings, visits with important customers, proposals to prepare, reports that are due, and decisions that need to be made to fulfill your role.
The phrase "time management" is really a misnomer-the challenge is not to manage time, but to manage ourselves. Instead of coming into the office on Monday and looking at all the emails waiting, the people wanting answers, the meeting invitations to accept, and trying to prioritize your schedule around them, you use time management differently. The principle of “Putting First Things First” is to execute on your priorities and take responsibility for accomplishing them by proactively planning your time, your day and your week. What good are Habits 1 and 2-the habits of personal vision and imagination-if they’re unraveled by the day-to-day press of things that demand your attention?
Most of us are good, and that is precisely why there are few that are great.Īs a sales leader, Habit 3 helps conquer good as an enemy in your day-to-day choices, which includes your responses to unplanned events, by making sure you’ve blocked out time first for those activities that contribute to your mission. I love the first line of Jim Collins’s book Good to Great: “Good is the enemy of great.” It’s a key reminder that the enemy of great isn’t “bad,” and it’s not “horrible.” It’s all the “good” things we get done. Schedule Your Priorities, Rather than Prioritiz e Your Schedule Covey called “the second creation,” where things get real. While the first two habits are habits of leadership (the “first creation”), Habit 3 is a management habit. When you’ve invested time in developing the habit of proactivity and envisioning what you want to accomplish, then Habit 3 is how you execute on your mission on the most effective level. It deals with things that are not urgent but are important – things we know we need to do but somehow seldom get around to doing because they aren’t urgent.Our latest paper on the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Sales Leaders – Habit 3: Put First Things First, explores how sales leaders can master this key mindset and schedule their priorities rather than “prioritize” their schedule. In the Time Management Matrix above, Quadrant 2 is the heart of effective personal management. Important matters that are not urgent require more initiative, more proactivity. It contributes to our mission, values, and high-priority goals. Importance, on the other hand, has to do with results. Urgent things act on us and are usually visible. Urgent means it requires immediate attention. We spend our time in one of four ways, depending on the two factors that define an activity: urgent and important. If you are an effective manager of your self, your discipline comes from within it is a function of your independent will. Management is discipline carrying them out. While leadership decides what “first things” are, it is management that puts them first, day by day, moment by moment.
Effective management is putting first things first. It is the ability act rather than be acted upon, to proactively carry out the program you have developed. It is the ability to make decisions and choices and act in accordance with them. Independent will makes effective self-management possible. It is living and being driven by the principles you value most, not by the agendas and forces surrounding you.” – Dr. “Putting first things first means organizing and executing around your most important priorities. Habit 3 is the second creation, the physical creation. You are in charge.” Habit 2 is the first mental creation, based on imagination, the ability to envision what you can become. Habit 3 is the practical fulfillment of Habits 1 and 2. Habit 3: Put First Things First is the exercise of independent will toward becoming principle-centered.
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