Do you feel overwhelmed? Are you spending all your time at work and still not reaching your daily goals? Are you regularly distracted, missing the mark with your schedule? Are you spending your time on activities with low or no strategic value? If so, you should develop time management skills –beyond setting your morning alarm.
As the responsibilities of our work life, family life, and daily minutiae are inked in our calendars, the time on our clock seems to fly by with increasing speed, and time management becomes a topic of self-improvement for each of us.
Time Management: What It Is and What It Is Not
In its simplest incarnation, time management helps us be focused and productive by organizing our time into managed -and manageable- intervals.
In real estate sales, we have talked about time blocking for years and designed schedules to foster consistent work habits –all too often with mediocre results. Indeed, it’s one thing to know what you’re supposed to do, but it’s something else entirely to do it. When attempting to respect the plans carefully laid out on our 8.5” x 11” spreadsheets, we fail more often than not.
Factors in Time Management
The reason we fail is that we think about time management as a flat exercise, a shallow commitment laid out on a 2-dimensional axis of activities versus hours in the day. We must remember that underneath this representation of what we are supposed to do with our time lie a dozen factors that can either positively or negatively impact our ability and willingness to stick to the plan.
These factors are:
Habitual behaviors: are you aware of habitual behaviors that consume your time and must either be eliminated or re-scheduled before you can stick to the plan? Do you have the skills to identify these behaviors and the support you need to change them?
Weak Focus: can you stay focused on what matters?
Lack of Strategic Plan: have you defined on a scale of 1 to 5 the strategic value of each activity in your plan?
Perfection: do you use your perception of perfection as a procrastination tactic?
Accessibility: are you willing to be unavailable? Can you let the phone call go to voice mail?
Too Much Drama: do you react every time someone screams “fire” or assess each fire’s urgency level before choosing the best course of action?
Interruptions: have you learned to curtail interruptions graciously? And do you choose to?
Boundaries: are you willing and able to set boundaries with family, friends, and colleagues?
Team Management: are the roles of the people around you well-defined and well-understood? Does everyone from the receptionist to the attorney know what you expect from them and what they can expect from you?
Office: is your environment conducive to the work you’ve set out for yourself?
Operations: do your and your broker’s systems and processes facilitate your workflow?
Stress: do you forget to plan for day-to-day matters and regenerative R&R?
Our ability to manage time effectively is much more than the careful penciling of activities on paper. Time management requires self-awareness and awareness of others. It requires people management skills and diplomacy. And it requires discipline and business savvy.
Time Management: An Exercise
Get started developing better time management skills by downloading this Time Analysis© spreadsheet and performing the following exercise for at least a week.
- Track what you do in 15-minute intervals. For example, if you go to the gym for one hour, count the four 15-minute intervals as “Gym.” Also, track how long it takes to get to the gym and return.
- Enter everything, even if it seems unimportant. The study will return exactly what you put into it, so be accurate and complete.
- At the end of your day, for each activity, complete columns 4-10 of the spreadsheet with your answers to the following questions:
What is this activity’s strategic value? Enter a value from 1-5 if you know it. It’s OK for you to guess.
Did it have to be done? Yes or No. If you answer No, then strive to understand why you do it and if you should stop doing it.
Did it have to be done now? Yes or No. If not, could you pencil in when it can or should be done?
Could someone else have done it? Yes or No. If yes, pencil in who should do it.
Did it have to be done quite so well? Yes or No. This is hard if you are a perfectionist because your nature will compel you to answer yes. Be as objective as possible when thinking about the need for perfection.
Any ideas to save time? Could you include any thoughts the exercise helped you generate for further consideration?
It is enlightening to track time and ask the right questions about how we use it and why. It informs us of the subtle and not-so-subtle internal and external factors affecting our ability to stick to the plan. Once aware, it becomes much easier to take corrective action and regain control of the hourglass that is our day.
Please be on the lookout for Part 2 of my Time Management Series to create a schedule that works for you and to manage obstacles to your time management plan.
If I can help you better manage your time and get your schedule under control, don’t hesitate to call or text 239-220-1018 or email coco@cocoamar.com.
Happy Selling ∞
