This time of year more than any other, your ability to sustain a high level of personal productivity is vitally important. As year-end arrives, there are more demands on your time, longer hours and late night appointments. You want to start preparing for it now.
Three things you can do to fortify yourself for the drive ahead of you are to get enough sleep, eat consistently, and exercise regularly. As simple as this sounds, these are generally the first things you drop off your schedule as it fills up with business demands. The key to keeping up with these revitalizing acts is to make them routine. Make them part of the system your business functions around. They really are that important.
To maintain a high level of personal productivity, learn to focus only on work that actually gets results. Know what must get done each day and schedule for those things at the times you can best address them. Even the time you get to bed is vital for your system to work optimally. You know the time between 8am and 5pm is your window for working directly with clients, so schedule exercise and other work before and/or after that window. And schedule client time as well – for example, prospect in the morning and meet appointments in the afternoon.
You measure the success of your day by what you get done. It all comes down to listings, sales and income. Make a daily task list – it is much easier than making up your schedule as you go along, and it will keep you focused on doing what is truly important and not getting distracted. Measuring and managing those tasks is helpful when you are just starting out, but once you know what you need to get done in a day through experience there’s no reason to focus on numbers anymore when it’s results you ultimately need to see.
The one number you do need to be concerned with is the one that grows your business: Open for inspections. How many can you do on a Saturday? How many more can you do with assistants? Open for inspections per week determine your number of sales per month, so the more you can do, the more your business will grow. But your ability to do more open for inspections rests on how good your systems are. And those systems are built on established routines.
Make a task list every morning. Meet with your agents and establish goals and objectives for the day. Then get on the phone, get in front of clients – get right down to the important work. And at the core, make sure you are taking care of yourself so that you feel up to doing the work you must do. Which means, sleep enough, eat enough, and exercise. High energy is vital to personal productivity and, thus, to success. Work hard so you can afford to take time off to revitalize, and come back ready to work hard again. That cycle will insure your business will grow year after year.
I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s Coaching Tip, and look forward to seeing you here again next week.