3 ways real estate agents can stay focused admid distractions

Put Your Business Plan into Action

Each and every year, real estate brokerages across the nation use November and December to encourage agents to prepare a new and improved business plan for the following year. Guess what? It’s time to put that business plan into action. Sadly, the challenge is finding the time to do it.

Now that 2014 has finally arrived, real estate agents across the nation have new goals to meet: more social media time, increased listing appointments, and more cold-calling among other things. Due to the nature of the real estate industry, an agent’s job is often filled with many distractions.

Because of this, it’s hard to predict whether goals will be met. We get so many calls and emails, and frequently the entire day can be spent dealing with a situation surrounding one specific transaction. Despite all of that, in order to achieve the next level of success or actually begin to work towards those goals from your business plan, you’ve got to stay focused on moving forward.

Ways to Stay on Target

Here are three ways for real estate agents to stay focused amid these distractions:

1. Use the Pomodoro Technique for Time Management. Named for a kitchen timer shaped like a tomato (pomodoro is Italian for ‘tomato’), this time management method was developed by Francesco Cirillo in the 1980s. While it is slightly more intricate than my description, the system generally involves breaking down work time into 25-minute short, focused intervals followed by 5-minute breaks. You can work undistracted for just 25 minutes, can’t you?
2. Stay off the Internet. One of our guiltiest pleasures and our biggest distractions is checking social media sites or responding to an email message or text when in the midst of some larger activity. If you want to complete large, moneymaking tasks more quickly and efficiently, then hold back a bit and change your Facebook status later in the day.
    
   If you need to do so, invest in an app such as iA Writer, Byword and WriteRoom. These apps and others provide a distraction-free experience for those creating content.
3. Just Say “No.” While I may have borrowed this phrase from the War on Drugs campaign popular years ago, it applies here. We live in an age of distraction. Most of us have between 50 and 100 emails in the inbox before we even turn on the computer. The next newfangled product or dangling real estate carrot is always a foot or so ahead of us trying to send out plans in a different direction. The key is to discern what you want and stay focused on exactly that.But, it’s not just emails and productions.
    
   People are distracting, too. Identify the problems, situations, and people who drain you. Then, eliminate them—either by hiring someone else to deal with them or by nixing them altogether. Once you get the distractions out of your life, you will be able to focus much more easily.

It seems funny to think that some of the predictions made in the movie Back to the Future actually came true—the handheld computers and the wall-mounted televisions, for example. My prediction for you is that if you employ any of the three tips I’ve shared above, you’ll find yourself less distracted. Now, will you still have real estate sales providers dialing you for dollars? That… I cannot control.