How to Become a Productivity Warrior in Your Business

One of the toughest things about being a successful agent is using your time effectively.

Real estate is one of the few businesses where you have to go find products to sell and prospects to whom to sell the product.

The only real thing you have is your time.

 
I think personal development expert Jim Rohn says: “Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money, but you cannot get more time.”

In light of that, your challenge is to figure out how to use your time as well as possible to get the best results in your business.

In light of that, your challenge is to figure out how to use your time as well as possible to get the best results in your business.

And it all comes down to one thing: priorities management.

That’s what time management really is, it’s making priorities out of the things that you need to get done each day, putting them in your calendar at the right time of the day to get them done and then executing on each of these priorities to get the absolute best results you can on a day-over-day basis.

The question then becomes, how do you identify your priorities and where do you put them in your calendar to get the best “bang for your buck”, so to speak?

More specifically, what does it take to become a productivity warrior in your business and get more done each day than any other agent in your marketplace?

I’d like to answer this question in two parts.

First, I’d like to share my favorite story on time blocking.

You may have heard it before, but it’s always good to read as a refresher.

A philosophy professor once stood up before his class with a large, empty, glass gallon jar. He filled the jar to the top with large rocks and asked his students: “Is the jar full?”

The students responded by saying; “Yes, the jar was full”.

From there, he dumped a large number of pebbles into the jar and gave it a few shakes so that the pebbles could scatter throughout the crevasses between the rocks. Once he did this, he then asked: “Is the jar full now?”

The students inspected the jar and agreed a second time by saying: “Yes, the jar is now full.”

At this point, the professor poured sand into the jar to fill up the remaining spaces up to the top of the jar. For the third consecutive time, the students agreed that the jar was absolutely full.

The professor continued the lesson by stating that the jar was a metaphor for everything that happens in your life.

The rocks are the most important things that you have going on in your life like spending time with your family and taking care of your health. From a business perspective, the big rocks in your day are the dollar productive activities that you must do to keep your business running and to make it profitable.

The pebbles are the things that also matter in life, but aren’t your top priorities (your house, hobbies and friendships, etc.). They’re important for you to have a great life, but they aren’t what give your life true meaning.

In your business, the pebbles are activities like training, processing paperwork, working on your business, etc. They’re important to your business and they need to be in your calendar, but they aren’t your number-one priority.

Lastly, the sand represents the remaining filler things in your life, and material possessions. Small things like watching television or running errands. They don’t mean a whole lot to your overall life and they can and should often wait to get completed.

The same applies to your business. Things like data entry, updating your database, running to the bank, etc., need to happen, but only after the more important things are completed in your business each day.

Unfortunately, many agents spend time doing the wrong activities or with the wrong people and as a result, they are way less productive than they want to be on a daily basis.

If you’d like to be a productivity warrior in your business (and life) here’s what you need to do in order to get your time/priorities management blocked properly:

      1. Rocks

• Schedule your time with your family first. You likely got into the business to have more control of your time, but somehow, along the way, your time got away from you and you’re spending less and less time with them

Put time in your calendar for a family dinner, a date night for your spouse or significant other, any regularly scheduled events for your children, i.e., sports, performances, tutoring, etc., and any other important activities.

I’m not saying you have to put them all in, just make sure you have some in there so that you make time for your family.

Once you have those activities scheduled, put time in your calendar for prospecting, door knocking and lead generation. Without these activities in your calendar, your business doesn’t run. If you’re newer in the business, then you need at least 21 hours per week. If you’ve been around for a while and you have some business coming in, 13 to 16 hours should suffice. Either way, you need to have this time in your calendar above and beyond everything else.

      2. Pebbles

• The pebbles are still important for your schedule and they need to be put in your calendar. Pebbles constitute activities like training, working on paperwork, working on your business. i.e., marketing, listing management, transaction management, creating follow up plans, meeting with vendors, open houses, etc. These are all important activities, they just don’t take precedence over generating business for your company.

• If you have a team of people working with you, pebbles can also constitute, doing reviews, training your team members and doing any other work that relates to making sure that your team is working like a well-oiled machine. Leadership is important and requires an investment of time and energy, for sure. It just needs to happen at the right time(s) of the day.

      3.Sand

Your sand activities are things that need to get done, but can wait until the other more important things get taken care of. For instance, activities like paying bills, closing out files, going to the bank, checking and returning emails and phone calls, answering texts, etc. are all in this category.

• Your sand activities are things that need to get done, but can wait until the other more important things get taken care of. For instance, activities like paying bills, closing out files, going to the bank, checking and returning emails and phone calls, answering texts, etc. are all in this category.

• A lot of agents use “sand” activities as ways of not working on their “rock” activities. They make excuses and spend time on their non-dollar productive work and avoid doing the things that are necessary to make sure the doors stay open and the lights stay on. It’s unfortunate, because having priorities misaligned like this can be very costly for a real estate agent.

You’ll notice that I didn’t put listing presentations, buyer presentations and showing houses into any of these categories. The reason I didn’t is because once you have these activities scheduled into your calendar, there will still be a lot of “white space” where you can go and meet with sellers and buyers to do business with them.

The important thing is to not schedule your rocks, pebbles and sand activities at times when you should be meeting with prospects and clients. Also, you can always schedule these activities to make sure they’re in your calendar on a recurring basis and then take over the closed slot if your prospect/client can’t meet with you during one of your open slot.

The best thing to do is to have things scheduled and plan on doing them at the time you’ve scheduled them.

When you need to meet with someone, offer them the open time(s) in your schedule first and only give up a previously scheduled slot if you absolutely have to. That way, your schedule and your priorities stay in tact.

What’s even better is that if you somehow get off track, you have your schedule laid out ahead of time and you can get back on track simply by going to what’s next in your calendar.

In the end, time blocking and management is really priorities management.

You need to make a priority out of doing what you’re supposed to do when you’re supposed to do it and do your best not to let anything take over what you’ve put in your calendar.

For sure, flexibility is the key to success, but so is doing what you said you’d do when you said you’d do it.

Watch This Quick Lesson to Learn More About Managing Your Time.