Business owners and sales professionals are always dealing with limited resources. Time is the most limited resource because you cannot make any more of it. When laying out business strategies for the next 30, 60 and 90 days, we should do so with particular attention to the issue of time.

When dealing with a time crunch, there are three traditional strategies used:

• Time management and organizational methods
• Technology
• Delegation

Each of these can help a great deal and yet none of them seem to help us to actually free up time. The reason, I believe, is that although time is a limited resource, we act like we can throw more time at a project if needed, thus sacrificing our family, friends and self in the process. We also act as if all hours are equal without calculating the different levels of productivity possible from the same hour. It is in studying the latter that we can make our greatest gains.

The question we need to answer is how productive can we be in a given hour. Although we might not know quantitatively, we do have examples in our lives where we have accomplished more in one hour than in others. An example of this is the day before a major deadline or vacation. We tend to be very focused with a sense of urgency. In fact, most of us could get a week worth of work done in just 2 to 3 days.

We don’t work at this level all the time due to lack of adequate energy. Without the adrenaline rush of the deadline, we lose focus and concentration.

In the book The Power of Full Engagement, the authors, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, make the case that managing your energy,-not time, will actually provide a greater return. They make a convincing case that no true champion would try to win without being prepared and the biggest way we can be prepared is to do the things that allow us to be fully engaged.

This includes:
1. Physical energy
2. Emotional energy
3. Mental energy
4. Spiritual energy

The author’s contention is that if you build your energy capacity in these four areas, your ability to perform at an optimum level goes up dramatically.

Physical energy is affected by 5 elements: breathing, food, sleep, recovery periods during the day, and level of fitness. The returns for working on your physical energy are enormous and measurable.

The Coors Brewing Company has calculated that for every $1.00 they invest in corporate fitness programs they get back $6.15. Other studies show a minimum return of $3.00 for every $1.00 spent.

With such large returns, it seems shocking that we do not pay more attention to our physical health. The reason the authors give for this is simple. “Building strength and endurance requires pushing past our comfort zones and experiencing discomfort. It takes time before the obvious benefits kick in, and most of us quit before that ever occurs.”

Emotional energy is critical in our efforts to be fully engaged. We have all seen people self-destruct through negative emotions. The way you build your emotional energy is the same way you improve your physical energy, by exercising the emotional “muscles”. These are self confidence, self control, social skills, empathy, patience, openness, trust and enjoyment. Just like the case of our physical energy, we build these “muscles” by intermittently pushing pass the comfort zone in each of these areas.  Mental energy, according to Loehr and Schwartz, are driven by appropriate focus and realistic optimism. In a study by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company on optimism, it was found that the agents who were in the top half of an optimism test sold 37% more insurance in a two-year period, and those in the top 10% sold 88% more than those in the bottom 10%.
The key muscles to be built to increase mental energy are mental preparation, visualization, positive self-talk, effective time management, and creativity.

Spiritual energy is driven by our “why”. It fuels passion, perseverance, and commitment and is strongly connected to our deeply held values and purpose beyond ourselves. To perform at our highest we must build the connection between our values and our daily actions.

If these are the four areas that we must have to reach our potential, then we must not leave their development to chance but rather develop a program that helps us develop each area. For it is in the development of these four areas that we will create more time and money for our families and ourselves.