There are plenty of books available to help you prioritize and focus, but Robert Pagliarini's latest book does a nice job of tackling this problem from a professional and personal perspective. In fact, The Other 8 Hours spends more time helping readers get better control of what happens after 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday night.

I asked Robert to address a few questions about work/life balance, staying in control, and regaining perspective in the midst of another day of firedrills.

Why do some people have such a hard time focusing on the right work and projects every day? Why does our time get so far out of control?

It comes down to two things: focus and distractions. I'm not much into sports, or sport's analogies, but here it goes. We have to know where our end zone is (i.e., focus) and we have to navigate through all of the people trying to tackle us (i.e., distractions).

So, first be clear on focus. You can have a lot of goals, interests, and projects, but you can only do one thing at a time. It's up to you to sort through the 101 things you could do, and focus on the one thing that is most important. Start with your three year goals - that's your direction and your end zone. Now take a step back and focus on moving the ball closer - those are your daily actions. I like to have a list of all of my next possible actions. If I have a five minutes before a meeting, I'll scan down my list and tackle something that I can bang out quickly. If I'm flying cross-country or have a block of uninterrupted time at the office, I'll jump look at those actions that are deeper and will take more time.

Most successful professionals wish they had more time with their family, but have a hard time making the work/family trade-off. How do you recommend these professionals balance more effectively?

Greed. You have to be greedy with your time. This means you have to protect your calendar at the office and in your personal life. Don't accept meetings, commitments, or responsibilities without first asking yourself if it makes sense in the bigger picture. Everything you say "yes" to is something else you say "no" to. If you value family time, make it a priority and start saying no more often.

In the middle of a busy day - surrounded by fire drills and interruptions - how can one get focused, centered and quickly more productive on what matters most?

What's the next action that will move me closer? This is the question you should be constantly asking yourself throughout the day. That single question cuts through all of the bull and gets you to focus on that one thing you can do right now. If you have to put out fires for half the morning, re-group and focus on the next action.

How can effective management of weekend time help us be more effective & efficient during the weekdays?

I think generally be conscious of time and disciplined in how we use it - whether that's during the week or on the weekend - is a positive step toward getting the most from our day and our lives.

There are any number of ways to turn a prospect into a sale. If they're not quite ready to buy, you can apply pressure and get them to buy early. You can create false urgency to get a quicker sale. You can give them a guarantee, or a trial period, or do something else to get them over the line.

Sales organizations do this and more all the time. Especially at towards the end of the month, they're classic ways to pad bookings and get past quota. On paper, these sales organizations look like they did their job.

But that's the only sale they're going to get. If the buyer wasn't ready, they won't be as successful as they could have been. If they're not truly qualified, the likelihood of a bad experience is high. If they were expecting more and got less, they're unhappy.

Those buyers are one and done. They likely won't renew, and they certainly aren't going to help bring you new business from their peers and broader network.

Bring in the right buyer - at the right time, in the right context, with the right expectation - and you're far more likely to multiply your money. Sell only to those who are qualified, ready to buy and need what you're offering. Sell to those who are ready to get started, ready to be active customers and partners.

Could you drive more short-term sales with harder, higher-pressure tactics? Sure. But the long-term impact of immediately happy and successful customers leads to renewals, repeat purchases, and word of mouth that translates to fast and cost-effective incremental new sales in the months and years to come.

We’ve had the pleasure of working with a handful of professional baseball organizations over the past year, and March is crunch-time for season-ticket sales.  Although season tickets are sold throughout the year (with renewal campaigns mostly done by now, and mini-package sales ranging through most of the season), this is the last chance to get full season tickets sold before most teams start playing for real in April.

Sales teams are reaching deep into their playbook by now, but here are a few additional ideas that might help get even more fans into the ballpark this year.

·         Social Media Mining:  Every team – in the Major and minor leagues – has a vast ecosystem of social networks, blogs, Twitter streams and other social content devoted to their every move.  How effectively is your team mining that stream of content for prospects who are ripe to buy tickets?  Is your team participating as an active member of these communities, offering inside information about the team peppered with occasional ticket offers?

·         Past Customers:  Not just renewals, but those who were once season ticket holders but have been dormant for awhile.  How back does your database go?  How many past customers might be interested again, and just need another phone call to get them over the hump?

·         Fans of Other Sports:  What about a co-marketing opportunity with the local football, basketball or hockey team?  Football season is months away, college football is too.  Season ticket holder of those sports need something to do until late summer.  Why not give them a deal on a baseball package to keep them occupied?  Could you partner with the other organization (professional or college) on a joint marketing campaign?  Would you get creative about the ensuing revenue to make it worth their while?

·         Corporate Incentive Programs:  I worked at a start-up that had four season tickets to the Seattle Mariners for years.  Those tickets were most often used as incentives by the sales team to drive performance.  Which organizations in your market could use season tickets to drive employee, sales team or customer behavior?  How can businesses in your market use season tickets to make money?  The possibilities here are vast. 

·         Charity Contributions:  What if for every season ticket sold this week, you donated a % of the ticket costs to a local charity?  What if the featured charity helped promote this offer to their own lists?  Could the buyer get a tax deduction for the % of the ticket price donated to charity?  Could the charity and contributors be recognized in a pre-game ceremony sometime in April?

·         Food Vouchers:  Buy season tickets today and get $X00 in concession vouchers to enjoy throughout the season.  There are countless ways you could play this, but the end-game is incremental revenue.  Better to sell that empty seat and get some income.  Plus, you know well-selected food vouchers will lead to additional food and other concession purchases at that and future games.

·         Little League:  Little League and other youth baseball organizations are gearing up for the season ahead already.  Could late season ticket sales also be a fund-raising opportunity for the local Little League organization?  For every ticket sold, a % goes back to the local Little League.  Or, if at least ten season tickets are sold to people within a specific local Little League organization, a team from that league will get an opportunity to come onto the field before a game, meet a player or coach, etc.

·         Season Ticket Sharing:  Are there groups who could buy a set of season tickets and share them with their communities?  Would a condo building do this?  What about a retirement facility, or the yacht club, or a local union?  How could you make it easy for them to buy, maybe even give them tools to help organize and split up their tickets?

·         What about April?:  The season starts, and fans are filling into the stadium.  How many of them have bought just an individual ticket?  Do you know who those fans are?  How do you reach them, register them, and follow-up with them with a compelling package for the rest of the season, or at least a mini-package?  Could you make package purchase offers that expire after the ninth inning?  Every game, especially early in the season, is an opportunity to capitalize on your best sales tool – the product on the field – to upsell those fans into more great game experiences.

If you don't know what you're doing, are you actually more likely to succeed?

If you've never done this or that before, aren't you more likely to ignore the biases that have dictated past execution and instead react to how the market works today, and what's needed to drive value there in real-time?

If you never studied it in school, are you more likely to respond to what's happening in front of you, vs. relying on what a textbook taught you years ago?

This economy is creating conditions for rebirth at organizational and individual levels.  That means lots of people and businesses trying things they haven't done before, that in many cases haven't been done before.  But rather than assume these innovators don't know what they're doing, perhaps we should watch them more closely.

Sure, their work might have a higher margin for error.  But their work is also a real-time laboratory for new ideas, new ways of building products, going to market, attracting customers, engaging loyal fans. 

Plenty of business and marketing leaders around us, executing without experience or biases, are already creating better, more efficient and more successful practices.  We should watch closely, as their work may be the new textbook for what's working now, and could work in our own businesses in the years to come.

Last week, Wade Rockett from Weber Shandwick and I moderated a session at PR+Mktg Camp Seattle on the organizational alignment of PR, marketing and social media functions. I shared my thoughts on the topic prior to the event here, but we had a number of good conversations in this session as well. Here are a few key points:

It's not a big enough question: We were asked to discuss the alignment of PR and marketing teams in organizations, but there's more to it than that. Who owns social media? If we were to start over, would customer service be a marketing function? And who cares about the organization anyway? We should be answering this question based on what's best for the brand and for the paying customer, not based on which desks are where.

It's about the customer: If we were to blow up the way we work today - organizations & agencies - how would we reorganize to strengthen our brands and make money (for ourselves and our customers)? The new organizations would look very different, would likely be more directly driven by revenue objectives, and would be far more customer-centric. Your customer doesn't see your organization as 16 separate units (customer service, PR, advertising, sales, etc.). Sure, those are different roles played by different people, but how do you make that seamless to the outside world? We're not doing that very well today, but we should be.

Executive support is key: Better alignment of PR & marketing around customer needs must to be supported at the highest levels of the organization. No reason why this effort can't start as a groundswell, but the cross-functional work required to create a more effective, externally-seamless execution just won't work unless it's supported by the people who manage the overall direction and focus of the organization and brand.

Align everyone behind common outcomes, goals and rewards: This one is simple - if everyone is measured by the same outcome, there's no choice but to work together on common campaigns, seamless execution and cross-media ideas that make sense and build value, preference and action with your customers.

My favorite comment of the day was from the founder of a local start-up, who said he's "making up" how to build a PR and marketing function for his company, because, as he said it, "I don't know any better." Well, if he's doing so with an eye towards what makes most sense for the business and for the customer, he's probably building a model the rest of us should pay close attention to.

Among all of the written sources of information we try to consume on a regular basis, there are those few sources that break through, that we don’t miss.

What are yours?  Here are some of mine:

Blogs:  I subscribe to a few dozen blogs, flipping through most of them via headlines in my RSS Reader, but I always read the latest from Seth Godin, Andy Sernovitz and Jackie Huba.  I also keep up with TechFlash religiously, to make sure I’m up on the latest news in the local tech community.  There’s a similar blog in your market (and in your industry), don’t miss it.

Newsletters:  I have them automatically sorted into a separate “reading” folder in my inbox, and many of them I read periodically.  But every week I read Verne’s Insights for great, cross-functional advice on helping great companies grow faster.

Magazines:  I read Inc Magazine cover-to-cover.  Even if you haven’t owned or started your own business, you can act like an entrepreneur wherever you are.  I also read the Puget Sound Business Journal every week.  It’s easy to assume much of the content isn’t relevant to me, my focus, my industry within this market.  But if I don’t know what’s going on elsewhere, I can’t grow.

Books:  Most books are one-and-done (i.e. you read them, then they collect dust on you bookshelf), but there are a few I go back to again and again.  Books by David Allen, David Meerman Scott, Chris Brogan, Jim Collins and Chip & Dan Heath I find myself referring to again and again for inspiration.

What are yours?  What reading material do you never miss?

His new book Social Media 101 is a fantastic primer for anybody looking for new ways to leverage the social Web to build credibility, community and audience attraction online.

Below, with permission, is an excerpt from Chris's new book. This segment focuses on how to reach & influence prospects.

How to Reach and Influence Prospects

We talk about how social media like blogs and podcasts and social networks will help us grow our business, yet we are hampered in several ways. Some of our customers won't provide testimonials. Others will take a while to actually execute a project. Still others have stumbled onto your site, and it's up to you to keep them. Let's talk about these prospects first.

WHO ARE YOUR PROSPECTS?

There are, of course, tons of ways to think about who your potential customers might be. David Meerman Scott talks often about buyer personas as a way to better understand those you're hoping to reach. In my examples that follow, I've picked only three types of prospective new customers. You have many other people interacting with your media, and it's up to you to balance your efforts such that they align with the relationships you need. Here are three prospect examples.

Private Customer: In the example cited here, GirlPie's customers don't really want to refer her. This means she has a private customer. You could say that SEO and search marketing professionals often have private customers as well. In these cases, your audience doesn't want to tout your skills, because they don't want to admit their prior weakness, or they may have other reasons to stay quiet.

Newcomer Customer: Some of us have customers from larger companies who are very new. They've been tasked with adopting an online strategy, or a social media marketing plan, or something like this. These customers are browsing the Web, grazing through keynote searches, and hoping to gather enough information to convince their senior team that they understand enough to make some starter moves. This audience will recommend you, but only after they've launched their project (and sometimes that's along while after you could have used their recommendation).

Clean Slate Customer: Several people find their way to your site by way of search. Perhaps you rank high in Google for blog topics (that's my constant number one search term), so someone searching for topics for their blog will land on your site and wonder what to do next. In this case, these potential customers might need a bit more content and guidance before they become actual prospects (and remember, we're talking business in this post, not community or other reasons for doing social media).

REACHING THESE PROSPECTS

In all three of the aforementioned cases, different tools will have a different impact. Here are some suggestions:

Private customers. Consider an e-mail newsletter with discrete information that reinforces your benefits. In that newsletter, encourage forwarding. E-mail is much more intimate than a blog setting. Consider a private online pay forum that allows for anonymity, if that's also useful.

Newcomer customers. Along with your media posts (blogs, podcasts, etc.), create specific-to-their-industry informational documents (or recordings or presentations), with an eye toward empowering your contacts with information that will convince their senior team to take action.

Clean slate customers. In many ways, the simple answer here is to provide great content that's useful, evocative, and invites further inquiry. From there, if you see any responses that match your business offerings, reach out. Send an e-mail. There's no harm in exploring a potential business relationship, should you see signs that a person has a need you can help fulfill.

You'll note that I didn't mention social networks much in this instance. The way I use social networks is to build relationships. I do any business prospecting by way of the media I create. I'm on the networks to connect, to be helpful, and to learn new things. Hopefully, that distinction makes sense.

BUSINESS ISN'T EVIL

The social Web has enabled all kinds of new opportunities to communicate. Business and sales are just one portion of a large spectrum of ways we connect and transact. As with everything you and I talk about here, it comes down to clarity of purpose. If you're selling something, state it. If you're looking for customers, talk about it. If you're there to educate, that's fine, too. They're your tools. Use them the way you want. Just be clear and open about it. What's your thinking on all this? Have I identified your prospect type here? If not, tell me in the comments at http://chrisbrogan.com/comments-from-101, and we can open the question to the community. What's your thinking?

Excerpted with permission of the publisher John Wiley and Sons from Social Media 101; Tactics and Tips to Develop Your Business Online. Copyright (c) 2010 by Chris Brogan.

I’m the crazy guy that likes to get more email.  I want to sign up for as many Webinars as I can (even if I can’t attend them all).  I want you to put me on your mailing list.

Why?  I want to learn from you.  What you’re doing, why you’re doing it.  I want to see what new ideas you have in your campaigns – your copy, your offers, your channels. 

Some of it is spam, and I learn from that.  Some of it is completely irrelevant to me, my family or my business.  I learn from that too.

By watching what you do well and what you do wrong, I’m learning what to incorporate and test next in my own campaigns (for myself and for our clients).

It’s a daily feed of real-time case studies.  As long as I can filter and sort through it quickly, it’s an incredibly valuable way to see and learn what others are doing right now to market and sell their own products & services.

This is a metaphor, but an important one I think.

Many companies manage PR in spurts.  They occasionally have news, and they have press lists.  With that news, they spam the press list, make calls, and expect to get coverage.  It’s on the company’s clock, not the reporter’s.  Resulting coverage is random and sparse.

Smarter companies think about PR more like a sales pipeline.  Salespeople, for example, know that most leads, though potentially qualified prospects, aren’t yet ready to buy.  But if you stay in touch with those leads, until they’re ready to buy, you’re more likely to increase your overall sales and territory penetration over time.

Same goes for PR, really.  If you want more coverage, you have to keep talking.  Keep publishing.  Stay in front of the reporters and publications you care about most with valuable information.  Know that most won’t cover you right away, but create value and interest, and more will cover you eventually.

PR today is still more about stories than relationships, but relationship-building in PR is really predicated on creating and fostering a long-term storyline that differentiates you and creates more opportunities within a publication or reporter’s editorial calendar.

If you've spent any time working with sales, you know it's an emotional job. Highs and lows, oftentimes a lot of drama, and a high-touch role to manage (both for sales managers as well as from peer to peer).

Those who have never held a sales role probably don't understand exactly why sales is so emotional. But it's that very emotion that makes the best sales professionals so good at what they do. It makes them push through the rejection, the cold calling, the hard work every day to make money.

I asked a good friend and top sales pro why it's such an emotional job. Here's her answer:

What other department in a company puts a board up on the wall and writes for everyone to see if you are doing your job well? If you look at any sales board in any sales organization you can tell who's having a good day, week, month and year.

One of my favorite managers of all time called it "the self esteem" board. In sales you make a choice to step out and be willing to fail in front of the whole company. When you choose sales, you choose being vulnerable.

Why would you want to do that? Because the feeling of success is so much better because it is written on the board. It's taking a risk and winning that makes me choose sales.

You need more sales people like this. You need more people throughout your company like this. I'll take the emotion all day long if it comes with sales and results.