“The great dividing line between success and failure can be expressed in five words: I did not have time.” Franklin Field

While you may never have heard of Mr. Field (there is some debate as to whether he was even a real person), this quote perfectly boils down the difference between high, average, and low performance in recruiting. While there are a variety of factors that aid or impede success in our profession, how we manage our time has the greatest correlation to long-term results.

The reality is that most of us are not naturally good at managing our time. We are easily distracted. We focus on the urgent to the detriment of the important. We gravitate towards the tasks we prefer, rather than what we should be focused on. We oftentimes are “busy”, but not productive.

In my time working with hundreds of recruiting teams, it is not uncommon to see some recruiters outperform their peers by 3, 5, even 10 times or more. Do they have some sort of unfair advantage over their counterparts? Well, no, and yes. No, they don’t have better jobs to work on. Experience helps, but it also isn’t the key differentiator between high, average, and low performers.

What the top performers consistently do better than their teammates is manage their time. They accomplish more (oftentimes significantly more) with the same hours in the day. Here are four areas that top producers leverage their time management skills to maximize performance:

1. “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” - Abraham Lincoln

Whether it’s for a day, week, or year, planning has been proven to significantly improve the odds of success. Studies have shown that if you write down your plan, you’ll achieve more. Put that plan in a visible place like on your monitor or wall, and you’ll accomplish even more. Share that plan with others, well you get the idea. The more visibility and focus you have on executing a plan, the more likely you are to achieve your goals.

2. “You don’t need more time in your day. You need to decide.” - Seth Godin

Ever have a day where you were really busy, but didn’t get anything done? Of course, we all have. That’s because we let urgent activities distract us from focusing on the important tasks. High performers are good at reducing, redirecting, and eliminating the urgent demands on their time, freeing them up to take on the most important. An easy but effective way to prioritize is to see where tasks fall on the “Eisenhower grid.” The grid is made up of two axes – how urgent is something, and how important is it. Urgent and important activities are handled first, important but not urgent are scheduled to be completed, urgent but not important are redirected, and those that are not urgent or important are ignored.

3. “Do you have 10 years’ experience, or one year of experience 10 times?” - Anonymous

The distinction in this saying is that in the former, we are learning from our experience and growing as a professional, whereas the latter is going through the motions every day without making any real progress or growth. High performers are focused on getting better every day, continuously learning from their experience and looking for ways to do things better.

4. “Efficiency is doing better what is already being done.” — Peter F. Drucker

In addition to focusing on the most important activities, another way to increase productivity is by doing those activities more efficiently. If it takes me 10 minutes to perform a task, but I can figure out how to do it just as well in 5, then I’m twice as efficient (and productive). Some ways to increase efficiency are through automating certain tasks, eliminating wasteful or redundant steps, leveraging technology to its full potential (such as your ATS), and timeboxing similar activities (such as recruiting calls).

Time management isn’t a skill to be perfected. There are always those days where we get distracted, or something blows up and we don’t get what we wanted accomplished. There are some times when we just aren’t as motivated or focused. But that doesn’t mean we can’t strive for continuous improvement, or that we give up when we have an unproductive day or week. Even with the occasional stumble or setback, ongoing focus on planning, prioritizing, learning, and efficiency can turn time into your greatest asset.

This article was published in Staffing Success magazine by the American Staffing Association. I'm a contributor to the Recruiting Today series.

Orientation Schedule for Staffing Recruiters

Help your new recruiter adjust to the social and performance aspects of their new jobs quickly and smoothly.  This sample schedule maps out all the activities and training for a new staffing professional to hit the ground running.