Are you making the best use of your time? How do other successful real estate agents manage their calendars? Are there systems that you’re missing that could boost your effectiveness and help you to see more clients and close more deals?
As a real estate agent, your time is valuable. It’s important that you spend your time wisely, and making the best use of your calendar can help to catapult your effectiveness forward. In order to increase your productivity, you need to make sure that you’re optimizing your calendar.
Here are 5 steps that can help you to manage your calendar and spend your time more efficiently.
1. Create a Schedule Template
Imagine yourself at your most successful; a thriving, profitable real estate agent that clients flock to and other realtors look up to and admire. What would your ideal week look like? How would you spend your time?
Let’s call it your Real Estate Dream Schedule. The exercise of considering how you would spend time on a Dream Schedule is a very valuable exercise. Consider what things are most important and how you should make those your top priorities. This process can be a pivotal step in understanding the value of your time, and the limitations of your workday.
Your Dream Schedule should demonstrate to you the importance of taking control of the “leaky bucket” syndrome. Most people’s work week becomes a leaky bucket where time disappears and gets sucked up by distractions. However, strong calendar practices can fix the leaky bucket. It’s all about prioritizing, having a plan, and sticking to the plan.
Use the Dream Schedule to formulate your ideal work week template and use it as your starting point for your weekly schedule. Consolidate your calendar, using only one tool as the central place for your schedule. Separate meetings and appointments from important to-do list items.
Once you have the template, stop recreating the wheel every week and start to use the template as a framework for your real life day-to-day tasks. Mold yourself to the ideal. Realistically, you’ll need to make adjustments to how you fit into that template each week, but you can save yourself a lot of disorganization by using the template as the foundation for your activities. Your template should be both your default and also your best-case-scenario schedule.
2. Block Your Time
Are you currently checking email all day long? Making phone calls here and there? Squeezing in paperwork in between other tasks? It’s time to start blocking your time.
Most people check their email 8 times a day and their phone even more times. This is one of the main culprits in the leaky bucket. It’s very disruptive. Create 1-2 blocks of time for checking your email each day, and for similar recurring tasks like returning phone calls. Stick to those blocks.
3. Group Calls, Meetings & Appointments
It’s far more efficient to group calls and meetings together rather than having them continually breaking up your day. Whether it’s an external meeting or an in-office client visit, book similar types of meetings all in a row. You’ll have fewer disruptions.
As a real estate agent, creating appointment slots can be a huge time saver. Create blocks of time specifically for clients and property visits so that once you’re out of the office, you’re making the best of your time out, and once you’re back at the office, you aren’t interrupted.
4. Establish a Routine
Use your calendar template to establish your routine. Designate blocks of time for specific activities and commit to sticking to that plan. If something isn’t scheduled, don’t let yourself become distracted. Short of a real emergency, sticking to the plan that you’ve formed will turn into an easy routine and will allow for greater efficiency in the long run.
Remember, your routine won’t be perfect the first time, and it’s normal for your routine to adjust from season to season. Tweak your template so that your routine evolves and makes sense for your current situation. Just make sure that you’re making those tweaks consciously and adjusting the template, not falling off your schedule completely.
5. Consider an Assistant
For a busy real estate agent, managing your own calendar could be a significant waste of your precious time. Nowadays, you can engage a virtual assistant for a block of hours every month to help you specifically with your calendar management. Also known as a VA, a virtual assistant can be available when you need them, but you don’t have to pay them for when they aren’t working. Outsourcing the management of your calendar to a virtual assistant can be a life changing experience.
Make Calendaring a Priority
The way that you spend your time starts to define who you are. Real estate agents that are always late and disorganized quickly develop negative reputations, while realtors who are efficient, on-time, and in control of their calendars establish themselves as true professionals. When you make your time a priority, you’ll find that people take notice of your business acumen and that you start to garner more respect.
Do you have a time management tip for real estate agents? We’d love to hear about it!