Using micro moments to maximise your networking success

What do you do with those micro moments? Those tiny, apparently worthless nuggets of time which crop up throughout the day, such as waiting for a late appointment, hanging around in an airport, that hour where a call took much less time than you expected.

For me, they used to be absolutely wasted. At best I would listen to an audio-book, at worst I would concentrate on my Alto’s Adventure score.

To be clear, I was the kid at school who would have won any exam involving staring out of the window. I can daydream, I can waste time, I can, left to my own devices, lose huge amounts of time throughout the day.

I have learnt though to harness these moments and, in doing so, I’ve made a positive impact on my sales and income. But on top of that, I’ve freed up time in the evenings and weekends when I used to have to catch up on the stuff I hadn’t done.

Here’s the things which I do now, to make sure I use my micro moments positively, rather than just waste them. It takes a tiny bit of planning, but has been ridiculously worthwhile to me.

I am, as I’ve mentioned before, a bit of a fan of Evernote and I use it to record and organise my entire life and business. I also keep a few lists lists of things to fill in those micro moments. The lists which I keep are:

1. People I need to call. Not the vitally important sales or client call, those all go in my diary. These are the others, the people I really could do with catching up with, ex clients, collaborators who I should speak with more often, friends and any other call which doesn’t need to make it into my diary, but I still want to find time to call. Importantly, whenever I update this list I make a note of the name and then their number. That way, when I have some spare time to do the calls, I don’t waste time looking for the number and, at least on my iPhone, can even dial straight from the Evernote note.
2. Travel I need to organise. Train bookings, plane bookings, car parking which needs sorting, hotels which need to be booked. An awful lot of this can be fitted in when I have those spare moments.
3. My next ten articles. I regularly brainstorm the titles of my next ten articles the, when I have some spare time, I can…