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Time Out: How to Make More Time for Yourself

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You might seriously consider complying when the CEO of JPMorgan Chase tells you to relax. Recently Jamie Dimon, along with his global banking head Carlos Hernandez, told JPMorgan investment bankers to take their weekends off.

These hard-charging, 100-hour-a-week high flyers are now supposed to relax if they aren’t working on a live deal. Wonder how they can do that? Here are a few ideas for them, and for sales professionals too.

Streamline your email.

You can accomplish more and thus save yourself time if when you work you actually are more productive. In the new book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, author Cal Newport suggests sharpening your ability to do productive work rather than wasting your time on busy work.

One major time suck is email. You might have noticed that some email threads seem to go back and forth needlessly--a classic example is when participants are deciding when to meet. Instead of the back and forth, Newport suggests offering three possible times and saying that someone’s choice will serve as their confirmation.

I also love his method for responding to emails which can reduce the number of incoming emails further. If you are part of a group that needlessly uses Reply All, stop it. Send an email to the group leader or participants and ask that this practice stop. A simple, “There’s no need to reply all to this email,” should stop it.

It's up to you to define what you think is needless otherwise people are sucking your time away from you.

Streamline your work.

What do you find yourself doing more than once? For example, I'm often asked to provide my bio in different word counts. After the second request, I realized that I needed to have multiple bios: a 25-word, a 50-word, a 100-word, and a longer bio. I created a folder that has all the different bios in it with bio titles searchable by word count for quick access.

Proposals and their contents can also be streamlined. There is certain information that will be regularly inserted into every proposal, even if you are trying to customize your proposals. This regularly used information is what you should create and keep in a separate file and have readily available.

You should also create a template to use for creating proposals. That way you aren’t needlessly formatting documents.

Even more important is thinking about your work actions. Why have files buried several layers deep in your filing hierarchy? Figure out how to create fewer clicks to retrieve your most-used files. You could move those folders to your computer desktop. Just make sure your computer desktop doesn’t become a mess.

Who doesn’t want more relaxation time and less busy work? Only you can make the right choices so you get to relax.

Profile: Maura Schreier-Fleming

Maura Schreier-Fleming is president of Best@Selling, a sales training and sales consulting company. She works with business and sales professionals to increase sales and earn larger profits. She is the author of Real-World Selling for Out-of-this-World Results and Monday Morning Sales Tips. Maura focuses on sales strategies and tactics that lead to better sales results. Maura is a sales expert for WomenSalesPros. She is part of their group of top sales experts who inspire, educate, and develop salespeople and sales teams.She speaks internationally on influence, selling skills, and strategic selling at trade association and sales meetings, demonstrating how her principles can be applied to get results. She successfully worked for over 20 years in the male-dominated oil industry with two major corporations, beginning at Mobil Oil and ending at Chevron Corp. She was Mobil Oil’s first female lubrication engineer in the U.S. and was one of Chevron’s top five salespeople in the U.S. having sold over $9 million annually. Maura writes several columns to share her sales philosophies. She's been quoted in the New York Times, Selling Power, and Entrepreneur.