Control the amount of time you spend on networking

Control the amount of time you spend on Networking

Most people enjoy the meetings provided by the Connect Collaborative and gain great value from them.
During these meetings, you often meet others that you can advocate for and that will advocate for you.
You often meet people with whom you can build reciprocal relationships.

It’s easy to see how immediate benefits can flow by participating in networking meetings.

On the other hand, it is more difficult to see and patiently wait for the benefits that indirectly flow from your network building activities.

Time flies when you participate in enjoyable CC meetings. On the other hand, time can easily drag when you spend time on activities such as sending invitations to connect on LinkedIn.

If achieving great results is important be aware of where you are spending your time.

Prior to COVID, many people spent several hours a week just travelling to networking meetings. Then there was the time spent before during and after the networking meeting.

Fortunately, with meetings conducted on Zoom, we can now all save the travel time and not be limited to interacting with only those that live locally.

Let’s say you’ve decided to allocate a total of 6 hours of your week to build your network, participate in networking, CC workshops and learn from the syllabus.

How should you spend those 6 hours to achieve the greatest results?

It would be easy to spend 6 hours attending meetings, learning and networking with those you meet in the CC. It is highly likely that this would result in some valuable advocacy. However, if you invest no time in network building, your results are likely to be severely limited.

It is therefore important to first decide how many hours per week you will devote to building your network. Then devote the remainder of your weekly allocation of hours to networking, advocating & learning.

Let’s say you decided to spend 10 minutes per day, 5 days per week reaching out to others on LinkedIn. That would be say 1 hour per week. Then you could spend a further 2 hours on team onboarding and network building activities. That would be a total of 3 hours per week that you would spend on network building leaving another 3 hours per week available for networking activities such as attending meetings, advocating and learning.

The main message here is to be deliberate about how you spend your time. Start by deciding how much time you are prepared to devote to your CC activities. Then decide how much time you will invest in network-building activities. Then decide how you will divide the remainder of your CC time. In other words, what meetings will you attend? How much advocacy will you participate in? How much time will you devote to listening and learning?