In this business, it’s easy to become overworked and burned out. Your success—or failure—as an agent is solidly on your shoulders. But working more doesn’t necessarily mean closing more sales. In fact, it might actually backfire. Multiple studies proved that working more than 40 hours a week hurts productivity. Real estate agent time management is a precarious balance, but there are ways to make it easier to stay focused and get more done in fewer hours. In fact, you’re about to find out a simple, flexible, and easy-to-use trick that’ll make it a snap to prioritize your to-do list.
The Eisenhower Matrix
President Eisenhower created this simple scheme to make decisions and task prioritization clear. There are tasks that are important and urgent—those need to be done right away. If the work is urgent but not as important, you can safely delegate it. A task that is important but not time sensitive can be scheduled, while something that is neither important nor urgent can be safely ignored.
Immediate Action
Core tasks are the ones that put money in your pocket and sales in your portfolio. These include communicating with your clients, following up on leads, and generating new leads. Core tasks should be done first and make up the bulk of your workday.
It’s a good idea to “single-task” as you work. Don’t try to do 2 or 3 (or 10) things at once. Block out a set number of hours to tackle one of your core tasks and then do only that during the allotted time. Much of the reason real estate agents struggle with time management is because they’re pulled in too many directions at once. That fractured focus makes everything take longer than it needs to.
Schedule
Work that is important but not urgent can be tricky to manage. You need to do these tasks—including networking researching, updating your marketing materials, and so on—but not before you complete your core work. However, if you put it off for too long, you’ll end up never making progress. Schedule these tasks on a certain day every week, or for a set number of hours each month.
Delegate
A lot of agents feel uncomfortable with the idea of delegating. Real estate is an industry that prizes individual initiative, so why would you put your work on someone else? Well, it’s because we can’t all be experts at everything. And there are some tasks that aren’t urgent or top priority.
Could you hire someone to help manage your contacts or screen cold leads? What about outsourcing your social media presence? Even if you can’t budget for a full-time secretary, a virtual assistant—a contractor, often overseas, who will manage more mundane office tasks—is an affordable and effective resource.
Ignore
Ah, the bliss of knowing that you can safely get rid of a task. These are tasks that seem like work at the moment, but in fact you’re mostly spinning your wheels and wasting time. “Researching” on Pinterest for several hours, for example, is not a viable strategy to make money. Sure, you might get an idea or two, but the ROI on such a time-wasting task is negligible.
