1. Don’t let the clock be ruled
One of the beautiful things about being a real estate agent is that you are not limited by a schedule from Monday to Friday, 9 to 5. This gives you a huge amount of freedom to manage your day according to your unique productivity patterns.
If you are an early bird, you charge your day by getting all your paperwork and research during the morning hours. If you are a night, wait until everyone sleeps to tackle the workload of that day.
Find out what works best for you through trial and error and embrace those best practices. By aligning your working time with your natural productivity periods, you can have massive profits of banks in how much work you complete.
2. Make a schedule and stay with it
After you have identified your best working hours, you make a detailed daily schedule that blocks time for all your tasks. A proven method for this is to look at everything on your task list for that day and place the most important items at the top.
A slightly different strategy for time management, sometimes known as ‘eating the frog’, recommends placing the most difficult or unpleasant task in advance. This ensures that it is done, so that you can continue to the rest of your work without the fear of an unpleasant task that you are sorting. Anyway, draw up a strategy to give priority to the work of your day.
While you decide what to approach first, identify the items on your task list that are not really urgent. Everyone has a few things on their list that can probably be rejected. Once you have restored some time, keep it open to those inevitable times in which a customer needs a last-minute show, or if another emergency situation appears.
Finally, don’t forget that your schedule is not only for your benefit. It also communicates your priorities to your colleagues and employees. Blocking your time tells them that you are busy with important work. It also discourages drop-ins, small talks and other unnecessary wastage behavior.
3. Ruthly Delegeer
Ideally, you want to spend your efforts on the type of work that you are best at – whether it’s marketing, negotiating deals, building relationships or something else. Determine clearly and objectively where your specific strengths are and delegate the rest as much as possible.
Because of this you have to hire the right team. A common mistake that agents make is to hire people who seem in themselves. Unfortunately, all that does is to make one of you superfluous. Rent people in those additional skills to the table or that are good in the tasks where you may not excel.
Once you have delegated, it is important to take a step back and not a micromanage. If you have hired the right people, you have to trust them enough to work independently. However, you must regularly check and check in to ensure that there is a kind of defined accountability process.
4. Cordon from communication
The majority of the task of a broker is communication of the personally reassuring customers, until the performance as a in between for the buyer and the seller, followed by answering texts and e-mails. Communication is even such an important part of the task that it can easily exceed all the boundaries you try to set until you are essentially on the call 24/7. You can not only exhaust this, it can also spread so thinly that when you respond, it may not get your full focus.
For that reason, one of the most productive time block techniques can be to indicate a certain part of your day to respond to e-mails, phone calls and text messages. Otherwise do not allow yourself to answer non-relevant communication. You will be more productive and the people who want to contact you will appreciate your time more.
5. Take advantage of technology
For time management and productivity there are various apps that can help you optimize your working day. Every agent is aware of Showtime and MailChimp. But document management – apps – such as pandadoc or cam scanner – or transaction management tools, such as Dotloop, can be a huge help.
If you need more general workflow improvement, you can use your true potential with Pomodoro apps for time management or apps that limit your use of social media or online time, so that you can concentrate on important projects.
6. Don’t let meetings steal your time
Some of the greatest time is bad for brokers are endless meetings. In many workplaces it is often a dual problem. Some meetings are superfluous. Others serve a goal, but tend to eat in productive hours. That means that you have to follow a top-down approach to revise your meeting culture.
First make sure that every meeting has a well -defined agenda. This prevents meandering conversations that often stretch meetings beyond their productive duration. The agenda must also make a list of the required attendees, which ensures that everyone there has a well -defined role. Finally, the agenda must contain a start and finish time.
Structuring meetings such as this can make them much more constructive. But to make your meetings really productive, you must have an open and encouraging workplace culture. Your employees must feel authorized to act and make real contributions or to register disagreement when needed.
Nicole Lehman is a PR strategist for smart real estate.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial department of Housingwire and the owners.
To contact the editor who is responsible for this piece: [email protected].
