Ask any Utah real estate agent.  A successful real estate career does not come by chance.  It takes setting goals and planning what to do.  A big part of planning is to successfully manage your time.  That is why we are going to discuss how to focus on how to use your time.

Time Management

Everyone has the same number of hours in a day.  We get to choose how we use those hours.  Time management is about planning how we want to use our time.  You must decide what you need to do to accomplish your goals. Everyone has to choose what is important.

Time management is much more than just keeping track of your appointments.  It is more about planning how to use your time.  We are going to discuss more about how to do that.

Time Management Tools

As you start to build your real estate business, one of the first tools that you need to get is a good customer relationship management (CRM) software program.  A CRM program is much more than a calendar or a contacts list.  There are dozens of CRM programs available online like Pipe Drive, Sales Force, Monday.com, etc.  Evaluate them and choose the one that works best for you.

A good CRM program helps you to plan and use your tool to develop sales opportunities including:

  1. Keep a calendar of appointments and record how you will use your time.
  2. Keep track not only the names and numbers of contacts but important information about them.
  3. Use e-mail addresses you collected on contacts to do e-mail marketing.
  4. Internal chats and communications with others in your office.
  5. Manage sales opportunities and optimize leads
  6. Manage tasks that you have outlined to build your career.
  7. Manage the territory in which you are selling.
  8. Customize and optimize reports to give you information quickly.

I hope you can see that a good CRM program provides more than a calendar.  It provides a mechanism to plan your time and to effectively use software to optimize your time and help you focus on what you need to do.

Why Time Management

You might be asking yourself why do I need to put in this effort to manage my time.  You might think that you can be successful just doing what comes to mind each day.  Maybe you figure you can be successful without all the tools.

Below are some proven concepts of time management. They have made most people successful who apply them so why not you? Think about it and decide what you will do.

  1. No goal is achieved without commitment. First, write down your goals. Ask yourself how committed you are to achieve those goals?  Hold onto that commitment and revisit those goals frequently.
  2. Create a list of tasks the night before. That way when you wake up, or arrive in the office you know exactly what you need to be working on.  Not only does this keep you from getting off task, it also gets your priorities on paper so that you open up mental space to focus on the task at hand, as you work through each item.
  3. Make your real estate career fun and enjoyable. It may be meeting people.  It may be happiness from helping families find their ideal home.  That happiness will show in your face and be infectious to those you meet.
  4. Time versus task. Devote the time necessary to succeed in real estate and then define the tasks that you will do each day.
  5. Plan to do only one task at a time. It is a myth that multi-tasking will make you more successful.  You either don’t complete tasks because of jumping around or you don’t complete tasks as well as you could.
  6. Prioritize – You should not only focus on one task at a time but also prioritize your tasks so that you are doing the ones that are the most important. It is too easy to get diverted to do tasks that are easy and put off the ones that should be done.

To prioritize, make a table like the one below.  Put all your tasks in one of the four blocks. Take all the tasks in the Urgent, Most Important block, prioritize them 1, 2, 3, etc. and start with one.  Do the same with the Urgent, Not Important and Not Urgent, Most Important blocks adjusting for tradeoffs between urgent and important.  Ignore the tasks in the Not Urgent Not Important block until no tasks remain in the other three.

Urgent

Most Important

 Urgent

Not Important
Not Urgent

Most Important

 Not Urgent

Not Important

 

  1. Build good management rules and practices. Force yourself to be organized.
  2. Be flexible. Problems, crises and issues will arise. Take time to think through problems and take            the best action instead of just reacting.

9.Organize your environment.  A chaotic office or car doesn’t help you to be more efficient.  Make sure you have a place where you can organize your actions as well as to rethink what you need to do.

Hopefully, some of these points will help you think about what you want to do.  There are many resources on the internet so don’t think you have to know everything.  You will find important help to build your real estate career by searching for help.

Conclusion

It is important to understand that success in any career including real estate only comes through knowing what you want to do and carefully planning your steps to achieve those goals.  An important part of planning is to plan the use of your time so that you are focused.  Good time management is an important ingredient of success.