Scheduling your day correctly is no easy task for newbies just learning to become one of the best real estate agents. If you aren’t careful, you will waste time on meaningless tasks or run wild from one crisis to another. You need a roadmap to get the most out of your day. You need to know where you are going and, just as important, how your time will take you there.
The Pareto Principle and Time Management
If you’ve never heard of the Pareto Principle, you may not realize how much time realtors waste before learning how to manage their schedules well. The Pareto Principle is a saying based on research. It says that 80% of results come from 20% of efforts. Can you believe it? It’s true, at least for those who don’t know how to stack the percentages in their own favor.
Let’s look at what the Pareto Principle means to real estate agents. When you’re in prospecting mode, you could spend incredible amounts of time on mundane tasks that do little to bring in leads or prospects. All the while, you’re short-changing your most crucial task.
The key to success is to discover the most essential tasks and prioritize them. Spend more time doing the things that will reap the highest rewards. So, what happens to those small, barely significant tasks that still need to be done? You have two main choices. You can delegate those tasks to someone, such as an administrative assistant. Or, if you decide that those tasks don’t serve any real purpose, you can simply take them off everyone’s schedule. You merely have to be aware of each task you do and whether it contributes to your business in any critical way.
Setting Your Standard Daily Schedule
As a real estate agent, there certainly may be times when something urgent comes up, and you need to break with your schedule a bit. However, it’s like most creative endeavors in that you need to start with a set of rules before knowing the correct times and circumstances to break them.
So, start with a standard daily schedule and try to follow it as much as possible. The truth is that in most cases, you will be able to hold off on a task until its daily time slot comes up.
Devising a Schedule
So, what would a successful real estate agent’s day look like? It would have time slots for all the essential real estate tasks and personal time. Remember to include times to do the following:
– Work on preparing for lead generation
– Sending messages to generate leads
– Working for the business clients you already have
– Following up on active transactions
– Taking a proper lunch break
– Conducting listing presentations
– Personal recreation and sleep
Stack up the time slots in a way that works well where you live, with your clients, and in your market. Then, use all that time efficiently.
Making Time to Work on Relationships
Relationships and connections are essential for real estate agents. When learning to become a real estate agent, you need to remember to fit in time for customers, colleagues, prospects, and industry professionals who could help you advance your business and enrich your life.
When will you find the time? Try making your lunchtime a time for casual relationship-building meetings. Realtors and others in the real estate industry will become allies in helping customers achieve their goals. At the same time, most of the people you might dine with are leads and could become prospects, then customers, and finally, loyal fans who bring you referrals year after year.
Continued Education
There will be times when your scheduled activity isn’t needed or cannot occur at that moment. For example, you might have planned a listing appointment, but the customer backed out. Don’t waste a moment despairing over a delayed meeting. Instead, you can use that time for additional real estate agent training.
Online real estate courses are ideal for plugging into those unexpected gaps in your schedule. Choose online courses with enough flexibility that you can fit learning real estate quickly into your day.
The entire collection of Roadmap to Success real estate online courses, such as RTS: Prospecting, is outstanding for realtor education. They will teach you much more about becoming a real estate agent than you learned in real estate school, including scheduling your day.
When you aren’t taking a realtor course, you could read books, including everything from literary fiction to biographies to self-help books. Or listen to a podcast or audiobook.
Conclusion
No matter how you decide to spend your days, writing it out into a schedule will help you stay organized and efficient. Even better, if you create an excellent plan, you could be setting yourself up to achieve the maximum results without wasting so much effort. The Pareto Principle can be your friend, but only if you craft an intelligent schedule for yourself as a realtor.