10 Steps to Better Time Management

Being in the Real Estate and Mortgage worlds can be overwhelming. At the CORE, we help you re-frame your mindset to go from “I’m overwhelmed” to “I’m in demand”. You are not overwhelmed anymore. You are going to eliminate that word from your vocabulary. At the CORE, we want you to be busy but structured. The Real Estate and Mortgage industries can have no systems, no structure, and no time management in place, but the good news is we help you fix that.

When I first heard about the CORE, I could not afford to come alongside the program, but I also couldn’t afford not to. I was at that point in my career. So, if you are reading this and looking for more balance, better time management, a higher income, and a greater life; You’ve come to the right place. Now let’s learn the 10 steps to successful time management from CORE Coach, Kendra Cooke!

1. Get Rid of Your Cell Phone & Pick Up Your Schedule

Your cell phone is a distraction. We must quit relying on technology to swipe left or swipe right to get out of our tasks.

2. Print Your Daily Schedule & Work From It

A time blocked schedule keeps you on task every single day. What is on my schedule for tomorrow? What do I need to be prepared for? The key to a time blocked schedule is more green time than anything else. At the CORE, we time block everything based on money. We want money making activities.

For Real Estate Agents, your green time will be listing appointments, showing buyers, and prospecting calls. Lenders will be pre-apps, pre-approvals, and meeting with buyers to get them into contract with their realtor. The darker green is the most money, lighter green is less money. You should have more green blocks than any other colored blocks on your schedule.

3. Print Your Week At A Glance On Monday

Find the white spaces and fill them in with appointments. White space is bad! If you have white space, you are going to get in trouble. You are going to get in someone else’s lane, you are going to step in the marketing persons lane or the billing departments lane. They do not want you in their lane. They have a job to do and you do too. This is why it is so important to time block every single day.

4. You Can Not Work 7 Days A Week

Do you think people with great time management skills work 7 days a week? NO! If you looked at my schedule you would notice that on Sundays, I have it color-coded purple. Purple is my favorite color and represents NOT working on Sunday. At the CORE, we will not allow you to work 7 days a week. You cannot work 7 days a week and be good for yourself, your family, or your team.

5. You Can Not Work More Than 55 Hours Per Week

If you work over 55 hours a week you will burnout! Do you know someone who left the real estate or lending profession? Its because they burned out. The average realtor stays in the business for 3 years. If you have been in the industry for longer than 3 years give yourself a pat on the back.

The reason people leave is because we have no system, no structure, and no one telling you what time to go home or come in, or who to prospect. I did not learn any of that in Real Estate school. I learned a bunch of stuff that I have never used, and thankfully for mentors prior to the CORE and the last 15 years in the CORE, I have figured out how to be a pretty good Realtor. Do not work more than 55 hours per week, you will burn out.

6. Schedule 30 Minutes Daily To Wrap Up Your Day

When you work super hard every day, you have to make sure to put in some buffers. 30-minute buffers a couple times a day give you the opportunity to catch up on emails and troubleshoot problems. Putting buffers in there to catch up in the morning and afternoon will keep you on task.

If you do not block some time in there to take care of problems, you will find yourself skipping out early on an appointment or running late to a meeting. We cannot have that happen! Time is money. You are working with people’s time. If you do not respect other people’s time how can you expect them to respect yours? If you get paid by the hour and know what your time is worth, you will not let someone disrespect your time.

To figure out what your time is worth, take your taxable income from last year, divide it by 12 months, then divide it by 160 hours. Now you know what you are worth an hour. Next time someone shows up late, you are going to need to reschedule because that just cost you $250, $100, or $500 an hour.

You can also use those 30-minute slots to plan your next day and truly conquer time management. How many of you come in in the morning, hair on fire, kids did not want to get ready on time, running out the door, get to the office and don’t even know where to start? Do not do that! No one wants someone whose frustrated, irritated, and always running late to work. Get yourself prepared the night before you leave so you can come in and hit the ground running. Set yourself up for success.

7. Schedule 2 Daily Power Hours

Break up your power hour time and have two hours of outbound calls as a minimum. I want you to think about your business as an assembly line with three stops.

  1. Where you get your product. So, if stop 1 on your assembly line is your product then this is your power hour. If your client is your product then why don’t we take them more seriously? Why aren’t we prepared? Why aren’t your call lists pre-printed? 
  2. Service. This is where all the delegating happens. You do not need to get sucked into tasks that someone else can handle for you. This might be ordering appraisals, finding listing pictures online, etc.
  3. Closing. This is where we get paid, or so we think. The biggest misconception of this step is that this is where we think we get paid, but that’s not correct. Your power hours are the most important. If you do not take anything out of reading this today, please know that doing 2 power hours a day will change your business tremendously. Doing 2 power hours can take you from 8-10 closings a month to 50. It is unbelievable.

8. Change Your Voicemail Daily

Do you grab your phone every time it rings? Are you scared you might miss a new client or a deal? That is a scarcity mindset. When you answer the phone every time it rings you’re basically saying “I’m scared to death of where my next deal is coming from and because of that I’m going to disrespect my client or leave dinner with my family to take this call.”  Reframe your mindset from scarcity to abundance.

Abundance looks more like “I am prospecting every day, I am making my calls, I am doing my letter of the heart, I am cutting my videos, I am sending birthday gifts to my VIP list.” When you put those systems into place, you will never worry another day about where your leads come from. You won’t have to!

Once I joined The CORE, my life was set to where if I stuck to the system and plan that I learned, I would always have an abundance of leads. I learned that I could change my voicemail every day and tell people what to do instead of always needing to answer the phone. When you ask people to do something and are clear about your direction, they will do it.

Let me show you a sample of what this voicemail might look like: “Hi this is Kendra with The CORE Training. I am so sorry that I missed your call, but I want to take great care of you. I am assisting our other coaching clients at the moment but if you will leave a message at the tone, I will be returning calls between 1:00-2:00 PM today and again from 5:00-530 PM. If your call is an urgent need please call my assistant Diana Joines at 1-800-660-6670, she will take great care of you. Thank you so much for calling today- make it a good one!”

What if you cut that audio every single day on your voicemail? I told them when I would call them back, told them I was in the office, and guess what? They leave a message! Shocking!

That is why we use the voicemail. Stop grabbing your phone every time it rings and stop replying to every email right when it comes through, you look desperate. You can put an auto response on your email to help with managing your time as well. Change your voicemail, change your life.

9. Schedule A Weekly Date Night

I want you to put a date night in there. I love hanging out with my husband! We golf a lot, we are together a lot. Its easy cause we are empty nesters now, but it was not always like that. When I was working 80 hours a week, I was sneaking out of the house at home to work in the middle of the night. I was leaving my husband in the bed we shared because I thought he wouldn’t notice. That was my second attempt at saving my marriage.

The first attempt he asked me to move my computer out of the house and I did, but then I was so addicted and living in scarcity that I thought if I didn’t go back and do one more thing at the office I might not be able to feed my family. So, I would sneak out of bed, go to the office, sneak back in bed, lay down with my husband.

When The CORE forced me to have a date night in 2008, it was right before the market crashed and I was scared I would go back into that scarcity mentality, so we established a date box. That date night and date box probably saved my marriage. We will be celebrating 25 years in May of 2021 and he is my best friend.

If you are not giving the people who love you and do life with you the best of you, then shame on you. They will be the ones that are there when the market does crash, and it will. The date night is super easy, just write down 20 dates and go from there.

It can be ice cream at Sonic, Christmas shopping at Walmart, it doesn’t matter what it is. Right now, a lot of people can’t leave the house because of the pandemic so an alternative would be putting the kids to bed, ordering a pizza, opening a bottle of wine, and watching a movie. That would cost you around $30. That fits our budget around here! Date night will save your marriage whether you are in the good times or the bad times.

10.  Time Management: R, R, and R

Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday are your results days. This means you need to be working extra hard. Turn up the heat and go the extra mile. Thursdays are your remodel days. What worked and what didn’t this week? What is broken? Fridays are your tidy everything up and recover days. If you are not worn out by Friday, then you did not do Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday very well. Your Friday afternoon is spent pumping up your teams and encouraging them to have a good weekend.

Results Driven- Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday

Remodel- Thursday

Recovery- Friday

 

Conclusion

Learning to manage your time properly is not the easiest task in the world. Maybe you’re wondering what would happen if you took 3-5 of these tactics and implemented them.  Managing your time effectively looks like a well- balanced life. People to travel with, hang out with, do your favorite hobbies with.

If you are not pursuing happiness and you’re not putting time in your schedule for personal growth, financial growth, spiritual growth, relationship growth, physical growth, and fiscal growth, then you’re missing the boat on a wonderful life.

So, as you are sitting on the sidelines wondering how to get plugged into this wonderful organization, I have got to tell you, if you are looking for a sign today, this is your sign. You are supposed to be reading this today. You invested your time and utilized your resources, it’s time to make a move. Stop sitting on the sidelines and procrastinating. Come alongside us, let us show you our system and structure will change your life like it did mine. Schedule a free coaching call with a coach like me!

Our CORE Training Program is the #1 Referred Coaching Company in the industry and was listed in Inman\’s Top 50 Coaches for Your Needs.

Loved this content? Check out our CORE Weekly Freebies page for more Real Estate and Mortgage Lender resources. We can’t wait to see what The CORE will do for your life!