Bayoneting the dead.

I am concerned about time being wasted in your business, I’ve not been watching the wrong videos!

Time Management may be an impossible thing, but there are lots of things you can do to save time in your business.

I used to work with a great Sales Manager; in fact he was the best Sales Manager I’ve ever had the honour to work with. He wasn’t modest, at times he was a pain, you needed to treat him carefully and sometimes people would take offence from the things he said. But, his team was extremely focussed and delivered a high class product putting many others to shame. One of his secrets was to bayonet the dead.

How many great ideas have you had over the last year or so? How many variations of them have some of your team had, and started work on? The only way a business grows and develops is to look at new ideas; they are the lifeblood and gene pool of long term success, they are what motivates and help people to perform. But they can also be the biggest liability a business carries, wasting time, soaking up energy and killing productivity.

For every three of four of these ideas you and your team start to think about, how many make it to the finish line? It has to be a very small number or they would have been “no brainers” that would have been done years ago. This is good; it’s part of life and how the less good ideas are filtered out. The trouble is that they often develop a life of their own.

Do you consciously decide to stop some of your ideas or at the very least park them until a better time? But, in starting work on one idea, how many little strands of work did you start going? How many files did you open up that now need closing down? It’s like my PC when I load a new piece of software so many other things get altered and intertwined it’s impossible to just delete the software. So, you decided to STOP the new idea. You need to ensure that you have stopped doing all the bits that were associated with the project.

Now for the big problem; you’ve started other people thinking and doing things with the project as well. It’s not good enough to merely say “we’re not doing that anymore”. I’ve worked in many businesses where people earnestly thought that they were helping the boss by working on a project (or they liked it themselves and wanted to keep going); you need to bayonet the dead. Ensure that everybody knows that you’ve stopped, why you’ve stopped, that you don’t want any other work done on it and really ensure that people stop. Otherwise, parts will live on and eat into your business profits and resources.

It may seem over the top, but bayoneting the dead ensures the team stay focussed on what you want them to focus on. What things are they doing on your behalf, that you don’t want them to be doing anymore? I bet there are some.

In fact, if you were able to ask them in such as way that they didn’t feel guilty about admitting it; they are probably keeping lots of them alive, in the secret hope of pleasing you. Find out, and STOP THEM!

If you want some more ideas to improve your Time Management, click here for some more free support. You may also choose to join our Facebook group, or follow us on Twitter; there are regular ideas posted online.

But if you want to make a difference-Now and you are ready to change the way you handle time, sign up for our e-course; click here for more details.