The most significant challenge in an entrepreneurial business like real estate sales is managing time effectively. The daily battle against procrastination, distractions, interruptions, low-priority activities, and ingrained customer expectations of instant accessibility can exhaust even the most energetic agent and can derail the plans of all but the most disciplined time manager.
Spending Less Time to Accomplish More
Many real estate agents invest too much time and too little intensity in their businesses. They put themselves on call seven days a week. They spread themselves thin and then in order to sustain themselves over this endless schedule, they dilute their intensity. Few other professionals work so many hours. Even doctors have a lighter on-call schedule than most agents choose to accept.
- Set aside at least one day a week to recharge and refresh you.
- Reduce your work hours appropriately and you’ll automatically be forced to squeeze more productivity into shorter spans of time.
- Increase your productivity by increasing your intensity. Give yourself deadlines with no option for procrastination.
- Take away your time-wasting options. Commit to taking time off and working during established, reasonable work hours. Automatically, you’ll force yourself to eliminate time-wasting activities
- Begin treating time as your most valuable asset. Real estate agents tend to be too casual with their time, which leads to career, relationship, or bank account casualties that could’ve been avoided by treating time as the most precious resource in their life.
Applying Pareto’s Principle: 80:20 Rule
80 percent of your results will be generated by 20 percent of your efforts. Conversely, 20 percent of your results will be generated by 80 percent of your efforts. You can increase the productivity that results from your time investment by assessing which activities achieve the highest-quality results. Too many agents allow their time to be consumed by activities that generate a mere 20 percent of their revenue. The moment they shift their time investment into higher-return activities, they see dramatic income results.
Manage time
Get proactive rather than reactionary. Typical day planners and mobile phone calendars are reactionary time management tools. They allow you to schedule time for client needs, appointments, and limited activities, but they don’t help you take control of time for your own priorities and purposes. You need to do that part on your own.
To master your time, you need to adopt a time-blocking system that dedicates predetermined periods of time to your most valuable activities.
The key point is that you can’t leave your days vulnerable to the time needs of others. You must block out periods of time for your own most important activities.
Do what matters
No real estate agent will argue with the fact that the activities of prospecting, lead follow-up, showing property, and writing and negotiating contracts account for the greatest results in real estate sales. These tasks are your direct income-producing activities.
Begin spending more and more of your time on the activities that are proven to deliver results, and refuse to be waste time on low priority activities. Filing, writing ads, creating flyers, and even processing transactions to close all are activities that are low-production and don’t directly produce revenue.
Invest the bulk of your time in direct income-producing activities. Committing your time to tasks that deliver results is the easiest, quickest, and most profitable way to earn big bucks in real estate sales.
Block your time
A time-blocked schedule reserves and protects slotted time segments for preplanned and predetermined activities. The objective of time blocking is to increase the amount of time you can invest in direct income-producing activities.
Many people have heard of time blocking, but few master its use. The challenge isn’t in creating the schedule; that’s the easy part. The challenge is staying on schedule. This is the difficult part because most people set their time-blocking expectations very high, reserve large portions of time, and then can’t maintain the schedule.
- Block time for your personal life first.
- Begin blocking time for direct income-producing activities. Block time for prospecting and lead follow-up first and preferably early in the day. Schedule time slots for appointments next.
- Schedule time for administrative tasks. Make a list of your regular, necessary activities, such as phone calls, office meetings, and company tours, and put them into your time blocked schedule.
- Finally, block some flextime.
Flextime helps you to stay on track. It allows you to put out fires, make emergency calls, handle unscheduled but necessary tasks, and still stay on your schedule.
Some Mistakes to avoid while managing time
Making yourself too available
The biggest error that sales people make is getting sucked into the interruption game. You need times in your schedule that are free of interruptions, during which you bar access to all but those to whom you grant exceptions. Limit the number of people who have unfiltered access to you. As you make your own list, include only those who are extremely important to your personal life.
Choosing the wrong office location and setup
The nature of your physical office has a dramatic effect on your time management and productivity. Give serious consideration to the following two issues.
- If you don’t have enough square footage for yourself and your staff, your production will be stunted.
- Don’t let your physical space limit your growth opportunities. If you’re crowded by your staff, you’re in the wrong physical location.
Your personal office must be private. If you’re surrounded by the buzz of staff members, inbound phone calls, problems, and challenges, it’s easy to be tempted to jump in and help, tackling the service issues at the expense of new business creation. The only way to control your planning and prospecting environment is to house your practice in a private office away from distractions and staff.
Try and meet by appointments
Real estate agents accept this knee-jerk scheduling approach as a necessary aspect of a service-oriented business — as if total availability equals service. Operate as a professional on an appointment-only basis. Schedule all appointments during time-blocked periods when you know you’ll be available, focused, and uninterrupted by any issue other than the one your client is sharing.
Do not procrastinate
Procrastination is the direct result of a lack of urgency to do what needs to be done and to do it now. Urgency is directly linked to success. Once you set your priorities, take action without procrastination by following these two pieces of advice
- Limit the time in which you can get the job done. Too much time to complete work can lower urgency and lead to procrastination.
- Give yourself deadlines. Have you ever noticed how much gets done when you’re leaving on a vacation in a day or so. I’ve seen people double or triple their work output in the days leading up to a vacation.
Develop a vision for your business
A good deal of procrastination results directly from a lack of clear vision or clarity about what to do. If you don’t know what you want, you can’t possibly achieve it. You won’t likely hit a target that you can’t see.
Think about the following questions
- What do you want to be?
- What do you want to do with your life?
- What do you want to have?
- Where do you want to go?
The famous success motivator Napoleon Hill expresses the importance of identifying your goal when he says: “There is one quality that one must possess to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants and a burning desire to achieve it.”
Knowing your objectives
You’ll set annual goals, of course. But also view each day that you work or play in terms of daily objectives. What do you want to accomplish today?
Setting your priorities
Your priorities are the most important actions or steps you must take in order to achieve your objectives for the day. Objectives are results you intend to achieve and priorities are steps you must take to achieve success. By prioritizing the importance or value of the tasks on your to-do list, you greatly increase the probability that you’ll be motivated to overcome procrastination and get the job done. Most people go about creating task lists in the wrong way. They write down all of the things that they must do each day and then go to work, proudly ticking off items as they’re completed. These people equate their level of success with the number of items they check off their list. Success, however, doesn’t result from how many things you get done. It results from getting the right things done. In other words, you need to know your priorities.
Create your daily task list as you normally would.
Don’t think at all about what is most important. Just think about what needs to get done over the course of the day. Put yourself in brainstorming mode and get your thoughts down on paper.
Once you have your list, create task categories.
You’re not prioritizing during this step. This isn’t about what to do first, second, or third. All you’re doing here is sorting tasks into these categories
- You’ll suffer a significant consequence if you don’t complete these tasks today. Even if you have to work all day and all night, these items must get done.
- These tasks trigger a mild consequence if they aren’t completed today. You probably wouldn’t stay late in order to finish them.
- These tasks have no penalty at all if they aren’t done today.
- These tasks can be delegated. They involve low-value activities that could be performed by someone who has a lower hourly dollar value than you.
- These tasks can and should be eliminated. They probably made their way onto your list out of tradition or habit. They aren’t necessary, so you need to figure out how to get them off the list.
Once your list is categorized, prioritize the tasks. Begin with your A category and determine which item deserves A-1 status. Follow by designating A-2, A-3, A-4, A-5, and so on. Then repeat the process for the B, C, and D categories. Go to work in the order of these priorities and you’ll be amazed at how much you can accomplish in less time than ever and without falling into the procrastination trap.
Every day that you achieve closure on all your A-category items, consider yourself a terrific success.
What’s your time’s worth?
Your hourly rate, or hourly value, is one of the most important numbers in your life, yet only one out of a hundred real estate agents can say what their time is worth. Ask members of a real estate agency’s administrative staff and you get the answer down to the last paisa.
Unfortunately, as an agent, you can’t simply decide to start charging a higher commission rate rather than the rate that is considered normal in your marketplace. But you can raise your income and the value of each hour invested in your business by increasing your productivity.
Stop wasting time
If you’re a newer agent, don’t waste time thinking over the fact that your skills or tools aren’t at the level of other agents. Work with what you have and know that your abilities will improve with use. At the worst, you’ll make a mistake from which you’ll learn a good lesson. Finding out early in your career what not to do delivers value that will pay off again and again in your future.
Stop letting others waste your time
Too many consumers feel no loyalty or obligation to agents. They have the idea that agents are well paid through commissions, but they don’t seem to acknowledge that we’re not paid at all if no sale occurs. For that reason, you should only work with clients who are serious about buying or selling and who agree to work exclusively with you to accomplish their real estate objectives. Otherwise, you’re letting real estate shoppers waste your time.
Manage constant interruptions
The best way to handle interruptions is to stop them from happening in the first place.
Turn off your cell phone when you’re conducting direct income-producing activities — for example, prospecting or lead follow-up. Tell the receptionist to hold your calls and take messages instead. Turn off your e-mail program so the “you’ve got mail” icon doesn’t pop onto your computer screen. Sign out of your online instant message program.
Follow the same rules when you’re with a client. Nothing is more impolite than an agent who handles phone calls while driving around showing clients property. At the very least, set your cell phone to vibrate rather than ring when you’re showing property.
Eliminate distractions for your own good and for the good of the relationship with the client you’re serving.
Keep phone calls short
When you’re making or taking transaction-servicing calls or production support calls, you need to conduct business in the shortest amount of time possible. Otherwise you’ll erode the time you need for high-value income-producing activities. To keep calls short, employ these techniques
- Establish an indication of the time available as you begin the call. For example, say something like you are getting into a meeting, but you wanted to take this call since it is important to you. This technique alerts the call recipient to your time limitation while also conveying that you value the caller and made a special effort to make time for the conversation.
Offer an alternative to a short phone call. If you think your client or prospect wants or needs more than a short return phone call, assure the other person that 15 minutes should be more than enough time but, if it’s not, you can schedule a phone conference when you’ll be available for an appointment later in the day. I’ve made this offer many times, and I’ve never had to talk with the client later. We’ve always managed to resolve the issues during the short conversation.
