Become more organized, and add hours to your day

Key Takeaways

• Staying busy is not the same thing as working efficiently and focusing on tasks that allow you to change and improve your business.
• Give your daily to-do list a sense of purpose — focus on tasks that move your business forward and keep your pipeline full.
• Add relationship-building appointments to your to-do list — meet with individuals or audiences who could become clients.

Fighting to stay productive is the curse of most real estate agents. Once you cross over into working for yourself — an entrepreneur on a quest to be a successful real estate agent — you may find yourself always working. In the wee hours of the morning you’re checking your messages to see if a client has popped up and needs help, or if you need to put out any fires. The demands on your time never stop.

If you’re focused on improving your business and increasing your income, it’s a slippery slope, and you can quickly find yourself never taking time to improve your business — or for yourself and your family.

Changing your business in any way or taking on new initiatives may seem impossible because your time seems already maxed out. It’s a daunting feeling to think about taking on anything more.

I’ve found, as a real estate agent with the earnings from my closings as the only source of income for my family — and with no guarantee when I’ll receive my next paycheck — I can keep working and working and never stop. There’s always something more I can do, something that will better my odds of getting a closing.

It’s a cycle that’s easy to fall into when you need to have money coming in and you have no idea where it’s going to come from. There is always something more or something else that you could work on for your business. It never ends.

I constantly see agents in a cycle where their pipeline is dry and there are no closings in their foreseeable future. So they start drilling down and doing the work to better the odds of generating some new business. Soon they fill up their pipeline — and that’s great! But then they stop working on those tasks and focus instead on servicing that pipeline. It takes a lot of time, but they’ve got some money coming in. Great! But then the pipeline starts to dry up again. And the cycle of panic continues.

So how do you stop the cycle of never-ending work? And how do you, at the same time, keep the pipeline full?

• Make sure your to-do list has a sense of purpose. It’s not just reacting to the things you need to get done that day; it’s also including things that will help your business move forward and keep your pipeline full.

• Structure your day to always fit in the tasks you need to do in order to have a more consistent income. Think about what’s going to help keep potential new closings coming in. This could be interacting with past clients and contacts who often refer you business, or building new relationships with target individuals or audiences who could turn into clients. Prioritize those tasks and strategies at the top of your to-do list each day. They’re the fuel for your business.
  
• Focus on being organized instead of being reactionary. This is easier said than done for a real estate agent. Sometimes you have to sprint to take care of something important and ignore your to-do list. However, this should be the exception, not the rule.

• If your to-do list for the day is realistic and not too overly optimistic, you can often complete your to-do list first thing in the morning, which allows you more reactionary time throughout your day. So attack your to-do list at the start of each morning. Your email inbox can wait. If you must check emails in the morning, be ruthless and skim them quickly for anything that is very time sensitive. Ninety-nine percent of the items can wait a few hours.

When you become more productive and organized with your time, you gain your time back. You add hours to each day.