Procrastinate on Purpose: 5 Permissions to Multiply Your Time - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rory Vaden is a Self-Discipline Strategist, Cofounder of the international training company Southwestern Consulting, and a New York Times bestselling author. As an author and business motivational speaker, Rory's unique insights have been shared on Oprah radio, as well as in Businessweek, Publishers Weekly, and SUCCESS Magazine. He is the author of Take the Stairs: 7 Steps to Achieving True Success.

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INTRODUCTION

Where I’m Coming From

You are about to radically alter the way you think about time.

And if you’re like the Multipliers you’re going to read about in this book, then chances are you’re (justifiably) protective about what you allow to enter into your mind and whom you allow yourself to learn from.

To me personally, there is nothing more frustrating than learning something from someone who hasn’t done what they are talking about.

The ideas in this book come from a variety of disciplines, but one thing you can be sure of is that they have been tested through the fire of real-life situations—including my own. Like most business books you will read, my writing includes original data from polling and statistical sampling that we have done, as well as through synthesizing existing publications and academic research. At Southwestern Consulting, however, while we do appreciate academic research, we pride ourselves on being practitioners, and on providing strategies that are of real value and not just a pithy pitch.

In other words, these aren’t just principles we have gathered from a smattering of sources and that work in theory; these are principles that we are actually practicing in our own company and learning alongside you.

I cofounded Southwestern Consulting with a few other partners in 2006. Shortly thereafter, we merged with some colleagues in London who had been working toward a similar vision since 2001. Since that time, we have grown organically to more than seventy team members and we have worked with more than seven thousand different sales teams.

Our core business is providing one-on-one accountability coaching to salespeople. At the time of this writing, we have personally coached more than twenty-seven hundred salespeople, sales leaders and entrepreneurs. That means we’ve been tracking the daily activity of how each of these people spends his or her time for six months or longer. When you work with people at such a close personal level for that amount of time, they are no longer just clients; they become friends.

And more than 75 percent of our “friends” say that “time management” is their biggest challenge and the reason they got into coaching. Because, you see, to a commission-based salesperson or an entrepreneur, time really is money, and it has become more difficult and stressful than ever before to keep up with the growing demands on our time. The most common phrase our clients use to describe their daily work challenges is that they feel like they are always “putting out fires.” It is a challenge that we understand because every single one of our coaches—including me—is a salesperson first and a consultant second.

We all sell and service our own clients. It might be more efficient and profitable for us to have some people sell and to then just hire a team of consultants to do the coaching, but then we wouldn’t know what it feels like to be in a position like our clients’. We wouldn’t be practitioners. And so it is through our struggle and through all we’ve learned from being alongside our clients that we believe we have stumbled upon some truly unique ways of thinking differently about time. We’ve had to learn how to multiply our time, and this book is going to show you how to do the same—regardless of what type of profession you are in.

Although one-on-one coaching is our primary service offering, we have also tested and implemented these principles in medium-sized companies and big business as well. We’ve provided sales consulting to companies in twenty-seven countries. These clients range from small family-owned businesses to Verizon Cellular Sales and DIRECTV. We help companies build more of a sales culture by helping them create recruiting processes, custom sales scripts, incentive and compensation plans, custom sales, customer relationship management (or CRMs) and anything else they need to hire, train and motivate salespeople. Our U.S. corporate headquarters is in Nashville, Tennessee, and we have offices in London, Singapore and Sydney.

We know sales. We love sales. We believe in servant selling and we have for a long time.

Our parent company, the Southwestern family of companies, began in 1855 (back then Nashville was the southwestern part of the country, which is where our name comes from) and is one of the oldest privately held businesses in the United States. In 1868, our flagship sister company began working with college students, helping them finance their way through school by training them to sell Bibles and other books door-to-door during their summers. Over the last hundred and fifty years, the company has remained true to that core business, and still today nearly three thousand college students spend their school years building a team of friends and their summers selling a subscription-based web product called “Southwestern Advantage,” which supplements what kids learn in school, helps parents help their kids with homework and instills the kinds of life principles contained in my books. Working with Southwestern is one of the most challenging and rigorous opportunities a young person can become involved with—and yet it is positively life changing.

Alumni of Southwestern include Marsha Blackburn (U.S. Congresswoman from Tennessee), Max Lucado (bestselling author), Jeff Sessions (U.S. Senator from Alabama), Rick Perry (governor of Texas), Ronnie Musgrove (governor of Mississippi), Mac Anderson (founder and former owner of Successories Inc.), Bruce Henderson (founder of Boston Consulting Group), Chinh Chu (senior managing director with the Blackstone Group), Donna Keene (former chief of staff for the Department of Education), and thousands more. Oh, and don’t forget me—I worked in the program for four years as a recruiter and sold door-to-door for five summers, over which I earned a combined total of about $250,000 to help pay my way through college and grad school.

The Southwestern family of companies consists of more than thirteen different business units in different industries, including the number one Raymond James financial planning office in the world, one of the fastest growing direct sales companies (Wildtree), and the largest school fund-raising company in the world (Great American). All together we have more than four million customers a year and generate several hundred million dollars in revenue.

At Southwestern, our mission is simple: to be the best organization in the world at helping people develop the skills and character they need to achieve their goals in life. So while there are many things that we do as a corporate family, the primary reason we exist is simply to help people achieve their goals in life.

Let’s start with yours . . .

Part 1

The Truth About Time

1

What You Thought You Knew

Everything you know about time management is wrong.

That is the premise we started from as we began the journey of trying to answer the question “How do the most successful people today choose to spend their time?”

After working with more than seven thousand different teams in twenty-seven countries and coaching more than twenty-seven hundred people one-on-one in their daily lives for six months or longer in the past eight years, our team at Southwestern Consulting has validated that premise.

Successful people think differently. And it is their thinking that shapes a different set of choices they make, which ultimately yields incredibly different results from the rest of us.

The most popular frameworks that the majority of the working world uses to understand, discuss and dissect time management have either been drastically...