Name your hours.

The concept of naming my hours was shared with me over five years ago while working for Buckle. One of my favorite and best mentors, Kari Smith, shared the idea with Buckle Manager's at meetings one year. I later shared the idea with another group of people and within just a few weeks, they changed their entire training process and began naming peoples hours for them.

That was NOT how Kari Smith had taught it to us.

The idea of naming your hours was not have someone else name those hours for you, rather, it was to encourage and empower you to take control of your day. Not someone else take control of your day.

I digress.

I want to share the thought more publicly in case it might help someone.

Everyday we have a list of tasks we need to accomplish from the day before. It happens to the best of us. I learned that if I take the tasks from that day, that were not completed, I could task them to myself the following day. When I worked for Buckle there were always tasks to accomplish. For example, re-fold denim in wall one, re-fold guys t-shirts on the oval table, go through the front rack on the girls side and pull-out all size runs to place on wall. The list could go on and on. There was always something to do in retail. There was nobody telling you what you should be doing, because they couldn't possibly know what specific project was most important at that moment in your day. I named my hours from the previous day to accomplish these projects the upcoming day.

What does it look like?

7:00am: Team meeting to discuss new product and goals.

8:00am: Pulls (Send product to another store that is having more success with it.)

9:00am: Open gate and give teammates materials on instruction for the day.

10:00am: Interviews

11:00am: Walk through and educate teammates on new product, styles, fits and washes of new denim.

12:00pm: Replenish wall/table that is empty. Add new product, brand, style, color, etc. You never know what wall/table it might be, but there was always changes that needed to be made mid-shift.

So you get the idea, naming my hours worked well for me most of the time. Other times my day would get completely blown-up and that's when I would adjust. My 9am might have been moved to 11am, and my 11am, might have moved to 3pm. Regardless of the circumstance the hours were named and if the plan changed I always had a back-up plan.

I began to do the same thing with other jobs as well.

9am: Cold call.

11am: Follow-Up with clients.

12pm: Drive to meeting.

12:30pm: Meeting

It went on and on, what I didn't finish up I would put on my calendar for the next day and finish my tasks then. This really works well if the tasks aren't urgent. If they were urgent, I fell back to the "Minute Manager" philosophy that Buckle taught. If it was something that can be done in a minute or less, do it. Don't wait, just do it.

Lastly, this isn't for everybody and I wouldn't want this forced on me if it wasn't my style. I found it helpful in situations, but I can see how others would never use this method.

Thanks for reading,

Julian Garcia