Time Management

This is the feature article in this week’s RealtyBiz Agent Success Newsletter.

I’m now back from Spain and have spent the last week trying to catch up on email, contacts, client relationships, and everything else that I put on hold for my vacation. Getting away was great – and I made sure not to do any work on the trip – but coming home to an inbox filled with thousands of messages was not fun.

While I love the instant access to virtually anyone that email provides, that instant access can be a huge drain on my productivity – especially when 80% of the email I receive is not urgent, doesn’t require a response, or never seems to get to the point. read full entry

This is the feature article in this week’s RealtyBiz Agent Success Newsletter.

I’m headed to the Priorat region of Spain for a week on Friday. Of course, I still have a million things on my to-do list and a million more on would-like-to-do list. As I added yet another thing to the to-do list, I realized this just wasn’t working. Every time I crossed off something, I added two new things to be done. Sound familiar?

After taking a deep breath, I sat back down with my list and started prioritizing. It’s so easy to stress ourselves out with all the day-to-day problems that come up, that we often lose track of our goals. In my case, I needed to finish up a client project, write two newsletters, and pack for my trip. Everything else fell into the “would be nice but could wait” category. read full entry

If you work from home or are a member of a small team, it can be difficult to keep track of all the ideas you come up with on a weekly basis, let alone implement them to improve your business. One way to organize your thoughts is to devote an hour each week or so to one business theme. Think of it as an accountability meeting, similar to a weekly staff meeting you might have if you worked in a larger business environment. Here’s a sample agenda: read full entry

Real estate agents know they must do a lot of marketing and prospecting in order to get new business flowing in the door. However, with all the marketing tactics out there – advertising, mailings, newsletters, websites, blogs, email newsletters, speaking, networking, referral marketing, etc. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the initial amount of work it takes to get just one of these things, let alone all of them, off the ground.

Whenever overwhelm hits, usually procrastination follows. Often, real estate agents are responsible for every element of their business from making sure the bills get paid, to attracting client, to doing the day-to-day tasks of helping buyers find a home or sellers sell their home.

In other words, it’s easy to get so caught up in many different things that you feel like you’ll never be able to get everything done no matter how hard you work. read full entry