I recently read “The Sales Messenger” by Mary Anne (Wihbey) Davis. I don’t normally read books like this and I am a bit out of the habit. I guess I will have to get back in the habit.

The Sales Messenger touched on a topic (one of many actually) that had aspects of both the concept of “the difference between activity and work” and “the choice of what to do and what not to do”. I found this very interesting in our current times where we are all asked to do more with less. The key here was choosing work that resulted in progress, and then performing it, instead of activities that kept us busy.

This is probably pretty simple, right? Surely everything that we are doing is associated with generating progress toward our professional objectives and goals. After all, we are all so busy at the office. The point was that we are all so busy, but when we really get down to examining what we are doing, I think that we will find out like those individuals profiled in “The Sales Messenger” that we are probably doing a lot of activities that don’t necessarily result in progress.

The idea that was proposed was that we should all create a tracking log of our time. We should note how many minutes (or hours) of each day or week are spent on which specific tasks we have been given, or chosen to do. Then we need to go through, or better yet, have someone help us go through the professional value that we derive from each task. This is the key. We have to be honest in the value assessmants.

If what we are doing is not directly helping us achieve our goals, or is not efficiently achieving that purpose, it is a candidate for an activity that should either be discontinued or changed. A prime example of this was provided in the form of “Networking”. We have all networked. We are all familiar with its concept. The example provided was in using networking to generate sales leads.

If you are spending time networking to generate sales leads, you need to quantify both the time you spend networking (time card) and the number of sales leads you have developed in each networking period, and assess if this is the most efficient use of your time. If it is, obviously you should keep at it. If it is not, you then need to decide to either stop doing that activity and free up the time to do something more productive, or change how you network.

Either way it comes down to clocking your time on the tasks you are performing, and then measuring the value that you get from each task.  I think we will all find that there are things that we are doing at our jobs that have little to no relationship to the work we need to accomplish. Sometimes it is hard for us to sort this out on our own.

I thought the simple idea of specifically clocking our time spent on each function, and then basically doing a micro – cost / benefit analysis on how that time was spent, was one of the best and most effective ways I have seen to help identify how we can devote more time to making progress and reduce our time spent on activities that are clogging up our already too busy days.