In almost any sport that has ever been played on the watch, the effort to score increases as time decreases, especially during the last 2 minutes. This urgency is especially true in professional sports and business. When you put the time restriction in your favor, good things will only come from it. At least the effort. Wins and losses come to a dime a dozen. The effort to fill your calendar is not as challenging as it sounds and very rewarding.

Filling your calendar is essential. Before we randomly fill the calendar to take up space, let’s do a little planning. Blocking time in your schedule is crucial. Allowing time to pass or taking the day as it comes will always leave you short of reaching your goals. We all need to win big, and it starts with your schedule.

Start by setting aside time for activities that lead to making money. The time lock could be email follow-ups (don’t check email), phone calls to customers, prospects, or network partners.

The first part of the time block is contacting the prospects who are generating new money. Schedule a meeting with them in 1-3 weeks. If you are depressed and do not have appointments, skip the current week in the schedule. Use the current week to generate meetings for the next 1-3 weeks. Otherwise, you will keep fighting. Backlog is good and meeting rescheduling is great too. I will explain why shortly.

Then call your current or past customers and schedule a time to share something new that you thought they should know. Please be sure to bring something new to the visit or call that they are interested in or should know about. Before the meeting is complete, let them know that you are looking for presentations in a specific area to share this information. Then schedule another follow-up meeting with them.

Now call anyone you know, especially other business or networking contacts, who are willing to hear your story and ready to hear any news about your work. When you schedule these meetings, ask if they can bring someone you can meet with and you will do the same. Make every effort to double-book these meetings for cross-presentation. Cross-presenting will keep other people’s interest in you and what you do when introducing others. It’s a great and productive way to fill your calendar. If neither of you can bring someone, that’s fine. It just increases the productivity of the meeting.

Content and marketing is the next part to fill your calendar. Since it doesn’t have a direct impact on the bottom line, it’s very easy to let it slip away and ruin your schedule. Even if it’s on your calendar, it’s so easy to get through it with a customer call, an email, or whatever. But we must stay true to ourselves to do so. Sharing content will generate presentations and future prospects by standing in front of them with new material created or shared by you.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to engage others online. This includes liking posts and commenting on targeted sites, such as LinkedIn (R). Comments are important to start the conversation as if you were there. Likes or shares a lot of content without obligation is simply a billboard in the hope that someone will see it.

Make a video. Surely we are all afraid of the camera or speaking in front of people. Knowing your stuff will make it easy to share the video information you share with people in your business every day. This should be something that can benefit others. It has to be something that they can commit to now. Doing a data dump of your industry knowledge is completely useless. How can I use a segment of that data to benefit myself (yes, I’m selfish, and everyone else too), then you could get my attention with a catchy headline.

Write articles, e-books, books, etc. Content writing is good for online keyword searches if you publish them on your website. The great thing about spending time on these is that you can print them out and take them to the meetings you set up, as well as email them to those who might benefit. Create value for them and do it often.

Another great reason to create and share content is that it will create opportunities to meet people. Someone will be interested in something you say or do. This is a great reason to get together and talk about it. It is the activity that leads to sales.

Back-logging meetings keep your calendar full. If your goal was to have 15 meetings scheduled a week, arriving on Monday with 8-10 already set takes the pressure off you. Meeting logging also enables you to reach a greater number of meetings, even 25-30 meetings scheduled in a week.

These are not all sales quotes. You want meetings to create new opportunities that generate sales.

With the above activities, you will surely complete your calendar. This will create more urgency to get more done. The more we do, the closer we get to our goals. If we are reaching our goals and creating new ones, we are going to do something massive in our lives. Keep the ball moving