by Kent Clothier May 21, 2013

The Essential Skill of Time Management

Time Management Can Make or Break Your Real Estate Investment Business

Developing your skill set around time management will help you to gain control over your life, as well as your real estate investment business. When you effectively manage your time, you know what to work on and when, thereby gaining productivity.

If your real estate investment business is going along at a fairly decent clip but you still very often feel as though you’re just spinning your wheels, leaving you feeling as though you accomplished nothing, despite the fact that you were “very busy”.

The tough news is, you’ve got a time management problem.

The great news is, you can fix it.

Try the following tips and time management tricks:

Take time for scheduling and planning. When you make time to create a schedule and plan out your days or week, you tend to treat your business more like a business than a hobby. When treated as a business, productivity increases exponentially.
Create daily-prioritized task lists. When you create a prioritized task list and manage the most important tasks first, you will find that you accomplish more on a daily basis. Always move unfinished tasks to the next day, giving them top priority unless some other task that is more important comes up.
Track time spent on tasks. Chances are you are spending more time on certain tasks than is worth it. There may be task that you can more easily afford to outsource than to do yourself, thereby freeing up your time to concentrate on revenue generating activities.
Avoid procrastination. This is a big one and the most difficult to accomplish for many people. We are all too familiar with the easy distractions that stumble across our desktop each day and that panicky feeling when we find the deadline upon us and have to scramble to accomplish a task we should have taken care of hours or days before. There are many resources for learning how to manage procrastination, or better yet, do away with it completely. Its beyond the scope of this article but keep your eye out for an upcoming post on eliminating the procrastination poison from your life forever.
Set goals and prioritize tasks to meet them. Often people tend to avoid setting goals because it takes time and effort and also creates a daunting feeling of the proverbial mountain to climb. Nevertheless, when we set goals we gain the priceless ingredient of direction and focus that will help us realize the business success we dream of.
Analyze the importance of tasks or projects. Sometimes you’ve got to ask yourself, “how important is it, really?” If it is not serving you or the success of your business, leave it. If it is not serving your business revenue to do it yourself, delegate it.
Minimize distractions. Distractions are a huge culprit when it comes to getting things done. Sometimes they are welcome distractions (because we are just bored and want to screw around on Facebook or YouTube) and other times not so welcome. Still, good time management requires that you do away with them as much as possible if you want to accomplish all you need to accomplish in a day; put some tools and rules into place to do away with distractions. Email, social media and the Internet can all be especially difficult to contend with if we require them for research or marketing. Try using a timer for the internet and auto-responders for email; setting aside a certain time each day to check and reply to email and for research or social media marketing management.
Analyze the value of a task or project before taking it on. If it is not a revenue generating task or project, it is probably not worth your time. Outsource to a good PA at $4 an hour; You’ll be amazed at how much more productive your business gets.
Have contingency time or plan in place to allow for the unexpected. Set aside an hour or two each day for unexpected calls or tasks; if nothing comes up, you can always utilize the time for self care, meditation, yoga or other projects you’ve been eager to get started on but that have not been at the top of your priority list. If you have articles or videos to create for your marketing efforts, make sure you’ve got a couple of extras on hand for use in the case of an unexpected shortage of time.

Those who effectively manage their time obtain optimal production realize the biggest success. The time is now; get a handle on your time management skills.