INTEREST
5 life-changing tips for real estate sales people Is poor time management impacting your productivity and mental health? Join the club! It’s all too common for real estate salespeople to start their careers with enthusiasm and excitement, only to sabotage their goals… or worse, burn out or ruin their relationships - due to poor time management habits. In this article, we explore how to get ahead in real estate, without risking your health or happiness.
5 Tips for Taking Control of your Time and Success 1. Observe how you naturally organise your time and action Are you strategic with your time? Do you focus on the strategies and tactics you need to achieve and maintain your goals in all areas of your life? Or are you racing through your days attending to the urgent, noisy tasks and ‘firefighting’ issues? If it’s the latter, here’s a couple of things to consider: • The important stuff is usually much quieter in our heads than the urgent. If you don’t prioritise it, you risk the ‘noise of the urgent’ overtaking your life • Our mental and physical health and our careers are too important to leave to chance. Both are impacted by poor planning • You are ‘x’ number of years from retirement. The future may feel a long way off, but have you thought about how much money you’ll need to be able to retire and live comfortably? Are you on track with building adequate financial assets to generate the kind of lifestyle you’ll need to live a long, happy retirement? If not, get clear… don’t leave your future security and lifestyle to chance! If you naturally organise your time in a way that is ‘ad hoc’ (i.e., you’re disorganised with it), you need to rethink this! Thinking about it might feel hard or boring, but it’s so important. (If you struggle to do it on your own, get help to think it through. Seriously.)
56
|
The Real Estate Institute of New Zealand
Jasmine Platt, Founder, Real Estate Leaders
2. Get clear on your goals This is such a critical one, and yet it’s one that so few people do well. Most people tend to rush around their lives – taking a tonne of action – and with a general hope for ‘progress’. But if you don’t have clear aims that are grounded in what really matters to you, you risk not achieving your goals, or adequately tending to your important relationships, your health - and any other important areas of life.
3. Make sure your goals are clearly thought through Know what you want - and why you want it. For example, don’t set goals like “to earn $300,000 a year,” if you don’t know what the $300,000 is actually for. It’s too arbitrary. Work out what you actually want (e.g., pay off mortgage, put Mum in that comfortable rest home down the road, paying for Dad’s upcoming cancer treatment, pay for kids’ private schools for the next five years, etc) – and then work out how much money you need to cover those things. You might discover you only need $200,000 – or, conversely, that you need $500,000. At that point you can re-evaluate your time and strategies for getting there.
4. Prioritise your personal “big rocks” If you haven’t heard it before, the term ‘big rocks’ refers to a well-known tale of a professor teaching his students about priorities and their use of time. He uses a jar as a representation of one’s capacity, and goes about filling it with big stones first, then smaller stones, then pebbles and finally sand until it’s full. He shares that if