Time Traps: Proven Strategies for Swamped Salespeople [Hardcover]

Todd Duncan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 2004

Productivity.  It has been a buzz word in the business world for years.  But despite our best attempts and countless self-help books, we still fall behind, work late, juggle our schedules, and become swamped.  Time Traps addresses the most common misconceptions we have about time and our use of that time in the marketplace.  Duncan has proven remedies for universal time troubles, and he shows readers how to set a schedule that works-not just some days but every day.  With the principles in Time Traps, salespeople will see a rise in their sales as they experience a drop in their working hours.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Thomas Nelson Publishers; 1st edition (2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0785263233
• ISBN-13: 978-0785263234
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #974,332 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's not about time management, it's about task management, January 3, 2006

By 

Marvin Corea "eMarv.com - Dealmaker @ Opportu... (Hanover, MD USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Time Traps: Proven Strategies for Swamped Salespeople (Hardcover)

One sentence summary: Build an effective and efficient team, don't waste time on nonproductive tasks and do what you enjoy doing.

NOTE: You may think that this book is not for you since it specifically states that it is for "Swamped Salespeople," but when you think about it, we are all salespeople in one way or another.

As a small business owner and entrepreneur, I am always looking for ways to make more time. Of course, everyone knows you can't make more time, but as Todd Duncan and his book Time Traps demonstrates there are ways that you can make better use of your time. The key is task management.

Here is a one sentence summary of each of the chapters:
1) Chasing the Wind - Don't try to manage your time.
2) The Identity Trap - Determine how to spend less time "working" while still being productive.
3) The Organization Trap - Stop wasting time (e.g. checking email every 5 minutes)
4) The Yes Trap - Stop saying yes all the time.
5) The Control Trap (get ready for a reality check) - Build a team!
NOTE: At one time or another we have fallen into the Control Trap. Remember, the first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem. :)
6) The Technology Trap - Use technology only if it makes you more efficient.
7) The Quota Trap - Quality over quantity.
8) The Failure Trap - Don't cry over spilled milk, learn from the spillage and pour better next time.
9) The Party Trap - "Success in never final." Winston Churchill
10) Freedom (the touchy, feely chapter I liked which you MUST read) - "If a deep voice inside is telling you there's something more, something better, something you're still longing for, something worth striving for and fighting for, then your heart is still beating and there is still time to do something about it." (Time Traps)

One other thing that I like about this book is that there are executive summaries for every chapter, so you can get a really good idea about Duncan's recommendations in an hour (or as long as it takes you to read through 9 executive summaries and the last chapter on Freedom).

This is another definite addition to the Corea Properties and Esenai libraries.

Gotta go continue building the team...

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very good suggestions for improving efficent working and life improvement, August 28, 2005

By 

Albert Cerussi (Lake Forest, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Time Traps: Proven Strategies for Swamped Salespeople (Hardcover)

If you are like me you are looking at this book because you have a busy schedule, or a seemingly endless list of tasks that mutates and grows with each waking moment. Todd Duncan has been there and offers some help as to how to stop the bleeding. This book was recommended to me by a Pastor who put the points of this book to good use in his own life with very positive results.

This book isn't really a strict time management text as the title suggests. As the author points out, there are many books for this. Rather, Time Traps tells you how to be more efficient by freeing up time to do what you do best (in this case, making sales). So rather than be a slave to email or the phone, the author offers practical suggestions as to limit tasks that are not really that important to the bottom line. For example, if you have necessary paperwork, find someone else to do it by hiring an assistant or seeing what resources your company has to offer. Don't spend your time filling out paperwork, spend the time doing what really matters, the task for which you were hired. As a research faculty member, who seems to have to spend more time doing academic busywork than actual science sometimes, the themes of this book ring frighteningly true to me.

Although the book is marketed towards salespeople, there are important efficiency improvement techniques that can be learned by people of all professions. The book quotes stats that the majority of salespeople spend 43% of their time managing problems and administrative tasks (it could be worse in academia!). There is a discussion on how salespeople say yes too often ... the same applies to researchers who sometimes take on too many projects and thus devote to little time to actually doing the projects well.

Some of the items here aren't immediately applicable to other professions. For example, as a research faculty member I have a responsibility to train students, which is a inefficient but rewarding task. It is not something that can be completely delegated, although after reading this book I see how what I am doing can be improved. And research is a highly non-linear process. In other fields the concepts taught here might be more exactly on the money, so I would definitely invest time to read the book. But the idea that we define ourselves by our work is right on for all professions; how many times do we think that 80 hour work weeks sound impressive ... only to see the effects this has on marriages, health, and children. This book will help in at least some ways to keep that output but require less hours to do it.

The book has a slight Christian theme, but the author has a lot of neutral "live life to the full" concepts that should not be too offensive to non-Christians. The book is a quick read, and easily accessible with many modern-day references. In all I think you will find a lot of uplifting and helpful information here that just might improve your life.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How to get 4 extra hours out your day...without working late, September 24, 2005

By 

Mark Valenza "bookworm extraordinaire" (New York) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Time Traps: Proven Strategies for Swamped Salespeople (Hardcover)

Early on in my career, I was given the advice to "touch each piece of paper only once". This is a utopian ideal, that doesn't actually occur on planet earth. In my line of work, there are up to eleven individuals involved in the average transaction, and i am supposed to somehow coordinate ten or so such transactions each month.

This book is for anyone who has worked a 12 hour day, and still had work spill over into tomorrow. Put another way, if you've ever thought to yourself "there must be a better way", then you ought to not only buy this book, but also read it from cover to cover.

No matter how efficient you may consider yourself, you will be surprised at how much room for improvement there actually is. This book offers simple commonsense solutions to the various "time traps" that tend to steal away hours of our valuable time, often without us being aware of the extent.


One of the major concepts is that you can't manage time, but you can manage "events". The book suggests various ways to study and perfect how you use your time, and suggests that if you "take care of the minutes, the hours will take care of themselves".

You might also consider checking out "High Trust Selling" from the same author. Both of these books introduce their ideas as laws or concepts which fit into an overall business and life philosophy. The ideas introduced are based on a study of top producers and superstars in various industries.

These books are both an excellent investment and a good read, and will probably change your entire outlook on time management and running your business "by design".