Time Blocking

This is the best video that I have found to really explain time blocking. 

We have to decide on how we spend our lives, in business and personally. Figuring out the big chunks are important. Since this is real estate training, let’s make it stick in the realm of real estate.

There are five main tasks that real estate agents need to do to have a successful day.

1. Practice – The best case is to have a friend to role-play with every day. If you don’t have that, it’s watching videos, writing scripts, assessing the previous day, and finding what changes or tweaks you could make.
2. Generate new business – This is finding new people to talk to about real estate as well as asking people for referrals. Here’s a list of 125 ways to do that.
3. Follow up – Fortune is in the follow-up. Just yesterday a friend posted on Facebook about an agent calling him to follow up on a call he received four months ago. My friend closed on the new house last week and this agent missed out on that opportunity. 
4. Show homes/Go on listing appointment – If one of these two things are happening, it’s very unlikely that the next one will happen.
5. Write contracts – There is no business without contracts.

If you are a new agent that doesn’t have clients to show home or write contracts, practice as if you did. Still, go see homes and practice writing contracts.

Time Blocking

Take those five items above and put it in your calendar. Sure, I know some of you got into real estate for flexibility but know that in five years 80% of you will be gone. Time blocking is your best defense against failure.

Some people color-code their calendars. Prospecting could be green for money. Appointments could be red so they stand out. 

Do not put things on your calendar that you aren’t committed to doing. If you start skipping stuff, you will start ignoring your calendar. You should live by your calendar. Some people use it as their to-do list. It’s easy to overestimate what you can do. The calendar helps you be realistic.

If something happens that changes your schedule, you need to decide whether you want to move it to later in the day or double up the next. Getting behind is dangerous.

I know there are some that will push back on this idea still. They want to fly by the seat of their pants. It’s always up to you but I want you to ask who do you admire that doesn’t do this? Imagine traveling and the plane just left when the pilots wanted. To get a little absurd imagine you put money into a vending machine that didn’t have the price and put out the soda when it wanted for an unknown amount of money. We expect other things to run on a schedule and it feels right, what do you gain by fighting it in your own life?

Here’s one more video for you to consider on time blocking.