As a real estate agent, you’re much more than just an employee. You’re an entrepreneur, a business professional, and a CEO of your own company. It’s up to you to implement time management practices that work for real estate professionals.
As real estate agents, we don’t get paid just to show up. We get paid to do the work and get results! The more results we get, the more we get paid, and the better our business thrives. That’s why time management is essential to running a real estate career.
Unfortunately, most of us struggle with time management, not only in our personal lives but in our professional lives too. Let’s take a look at some time management tips that can help you run your business more effectively and get the most out of each day.
1. Log Your Day
To begin the implementation of solid time management skills in your real estate career, you need to know how you actually spend your time. This means that you’re going to want to start logging your day so that you know what each hour–each minute–is devoted to.
How are you spending the majority of your time? Do you spend too much time getting ready for the day? Or too many mindless minutes on social media? Are you so busy with repetitive tasks that you never get to what’s really important?
To keep track of how your time is spent each day, grab a spreadsheet and start recording what you do every hour. In fact, every 15 to 30 minutes, you should write down what activity you’ve been working on. This will get you an accurate reading of how you’ve been spending your time.
Be sure you don’t lie about this either. In the end, you’re really only lying to yourself and making your life a lot harder. Instead of worrying about how ashamed you are of what you’ve been doing, focus on what you can do to improve your time management practices.
Now that you know where your time is currently going, it will be easier to implement change that will help you spend your time better.
2. Block Schedule Your Day
The next step to time management is to block schedule your day. Block out hours in your day that you are going to dedicate to business-related tasks such as:
- Prospecting
- Showing homes
- Negotiating deals
- Etc.
Once you have that time blocked, be sure to actually spend that time on those specific tasks. No cheating! You’ll never improve if you keep sloughing off in the middle of tasks because you’re tired of doing them. You absolutely must put all your energy into the right tasks at the time you’ve blocked off for them.
When it’s time for you to prospect, PROSPECT! Don’t let yourself get sucked into a rabbit hole that feels productive (like research on YouTube, for example). Focus on the task at hand and that task alone.
3. Delegate Tasks
It can be easy to feel that you have to do everything alone. But that couldn’t be further from the truth! Even as an entrepreneur, you’re still going to need help to get things done. When you take the time to log your day, you can tell what tasks you really need to get help with.
It generally isn’t hard to see when you need to stop doing something. If you hate doing it, just really aren’t very good at it, or don’t have enough time to get to it on a regular basis, it’s probably time to hand it over to someone else.
For example, if you love creating and filming videos for your business but don’t have the desire or ability to edit those videos, don’t waste your time, energy, and money trying to get better at editing.
Instead, hire someone else who loves editing and delegate the editing task to them! In the end, it will be cheaper to hire someone else to take care of that so that you can focus your time and energy on the tasks you enjoy doing that make you money…instead of wasting more time and energy on tasks that don’t make you money and end up depleting you.
4. Automate as Many Processes as You Can
There are certain processes that just work better on a machine. Use the tools available to you online or with your CRM to automate processes that take you too much time or that you can’t do well.
For example, if you find yourself going back and forth with clients over when to meet on a stream of like 20 emails, you may want to get free software like Calendly to help you schedule meetings. That way, clients can choose a block of time you have already determined is available without having to keep emailing you about your availability.
You’ll save hours of texting and emailing clients who want to meet with you by simply sharing your calendar so that they can choose a time that works for them without having to get your approval first. There are many similar programs and types of software out there that will save you time and energy by automating processes that don’t need to be complicated.
Conclusion
Time management as a real estate agent is often challenging, but it’s crucial to keeping your business running efficiently. If you’re interested in getting started with effective time management practices, just remember these tips:
- Know how you spend your time.
- Set specific time blocks for the tasks that are most important to you.
- Delegate wherever and whenever you can.
- Use automation to make your day run smoother.