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As a business owner, especially if you are a small business owner, you probably find tremendous demands on your time everyday. Handling the day to day operations, such as, accounting, payroll, purchasing, banking, staff meetings, planning, etc can keep you busy beyond just normal working hours. Add, on top of this, appointments with vendors wanting your business, existing and potential clients, and the necessary personal appointments (Doctor, Dentist, etc) that can impact your daily work schedules. With all these areas to juggle, you need a good time management system to help you in areas where you have control. But, even with the best time management system there are always situations involving appointments with other people that will cause you a loss of productive time. This article will address a couple of tips on how to keep your appointments from causing you to lose productive time.
Appointments with Vendors and Clients
If you work in a large metropolitan area, traveling to and from appointments in traffic can take up your very valuable time. You can avoid losing time to travel by requesting to vendors that want your business to meet in your place of business. You will probably find that many vendors will accommodate you since they want your business. Be firm if necessary and ask them to bring demos and samples to you. By having the vendor travel to you, you remove the productivity loss and you can work right up to the time you have blocked out for your appointment.
If there is some reason you must meet outside of your place of business, try to meet at a location nearest your place of business if a neutral location is required. If the vendor wants to meet for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or cocktails, it would be wiser to suggest coffee. This way you can make an early exit when you feel the meeting is over instead of having to politely sit through a two-hour lunch when you have pressing issues to deal with. This is not saying you have to be callous, but rather understanding that many people will unknowingly take your time for granted.
Of course, there will always be occasions when you must meet at the vendor location. Try to schedule these meetings at your convenience such as the slow periods of your day. Remember the vendors want your business and can probably be persuaded to meet you on your terms.
Meeting with existing and potential clients puts you in a much more delicate position. While we would like to have our client meetings in the most convenient time slot in our schedule, this will not be possible. Always do what is necessary to secure your client's business. If your client wants to meet in their office, you meet in their office. If they want to meet for dinner, you do dinner.
If you must travel to an appointment, consider using your cell phone to place and take calls while on the road. Some of you will object to this concept because of safety issues while driving and some states are passing laws against talking on the cell phone while driving. While we are not advocating talking on the cell phone and driving, there are many people who find this a productive use of travel time.
Missed Appointments and the Waiting Game
Another area where productive time can be loss related to appointments is when the party you are going to meet with misses their appointment or is late. If you are in your office and the person you are to meet either is late or no-shows you altogether, it's not a real showstopper. You were working right up to the appointment anyway.
What if you need to travel to somewhere outside of your office? Again, take your cell phone, take some work with you that you can read or review and take your laptop with you to work on if necessary. While this seems so logical, there are many of you who travel to appointments to meet with normally reliable people who wound up forgetting or were caught in traffic trying to get back to their office and you will be playing the waiting game.
How can you avoid missed appointments and the waiting game? There are no sure-fire fixes but here are a couple of tips. Send email confirmations and always call and confirm every appointment. If you have a long distance to drive, always call before you set out onto the road to make sure the party you are going to meet is going to be there or on time. This applies when leaving for Doctor or Dentist appointments. Call ahead to see if you will be seen on time or if it will be all right to arrive later if you will be seen later.
Remember, to the other person, their time is more important to them than your time is and conversely, your time is more important to you than their time is so put the control in your hands by suggesting appointments at your place of business and by confirming all appointments. Take your cell phone and documents you can work on or review in case of delay or no-shows. Make all your time productive.
June 11, 2000
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