The 5 O’clock Club
Published March 12th, 2008Have you ever wished you could add a day or two to your week??? The founder of my direct sales company suggests that you can have a NINE day work-week, by joining the “5 O’Clock Club.” She said, “It’s hard at first. But get out of that bed and do it anyway! Three early risings makes an extra day. 6 early risings gives you the 9 day week!” I also found another fun link about the benefits of joining this club at the blog Cranberry Corner.
Here are some other words of wisdom that our founder has mentioned in previous speeches to her consultants & directors about managing your time:
If you had a bank that credited your account every morning with $86,400 dollars and carried over no balance from day to day, and allowed you to keep no cash in your account, and every evening cancelled whatever part of the account you had failed to use that day, what would you do? I know what you would do… why, of course, you’d draw out every single cent, and spend it, right? Well, you DO have such a bank, and it’s name is TIME. Every morning, you are credited with 86,400 seconds. And every night, it rules off as lost whatever you haven’t used for a good purpose. It carries over no balances, allows no overdrafts, and each day it opens a new account for you, and each night it burns the record of the day. If you fail to use today’s deposit, the loss is yours. There’s no going back! No drawing against tomorrow. You have to live in the present for today’s deposit; and I want you to invest it so as to get the most and utmost in health and happiness [for your family], and success in your career.
Learn to manage your time. It’s one of the most precious commodaties that we have! Sometimes you have to learn to say no, because overcommitment dillutes your effectiveness.
Have a sense of urgency! Do it now! Do it today. Don’t put it off till tomorrow. Make every day count, every hour count, every minute count!
And one last thing I have learned for time management from the founder is using a Weekly Plan Sheet:
If you can sit down on Sunday night and think about your upcoming week in advance, planning each hour of the day to design a perfect week, and then stick to it, your week will be SO much more effective! Here is an article from my direct sales company’s consultant magazine that describes a top consultant named Judy Wertheimer. At the time of the article, she had over 800 customers and had qualified for our top sales award for personal sales 7 times! She mentions using the Weekly Time Sheet in her story: Magazine article- Judy Wertheimer
I personally like to fill out my weekly plan sheet in Microsoft Outlook in the Calendar. I create what a perfect week could look like in a separate “calendar,” then copy over whichever specific appointments and activities I want to have for that certain week into my real calendar. This “Weekly Plan” calendar shows green boxes of available appointment time; I would never schedule appointments during ALL of those times, it just shows me some possible or “tentative” times that my potential & current customers can come see me, OR time that I can use for making my phone calls. It also shows my teaching hours… which occur in the morning whenever I am on-track. One nice thing about doing it in Outlook is that you can show your time as “free,” “busy,” “out of office,” or “tentative” for each appointment. Look at the colored strip to the left of each appointment: white means “free,” blue means “busy,” purple means “out of office,” and blue with white stripes means “tentative.” Here is a picture of what my week looks like so far for next week!
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