Power Tools to Fuel Your Productivity and Remove Distractions
Tue, Jul 29, 2014
I was recently working with a real estate agent who seemed to do everything at the same time. She was talking on the phone, texting on her cell, and answering emails all at once. Upon first glance, she appeared every bit the uber-successful businesswoman, answering inquiries at every turn. But there is a notable difference between being busy and being successful, and this woman was only the former. How do I know this? Multitasking does entail getting more done…but at a lesser quality of work. The agent I worked with had to call her client back to confirm items she had missed in their conversation. She ended up rewriting the email from scratch. And she had to send an embarrassed follow up to her non-sensible text message filled with autocorrected typos. She made more work for herself by trying to take shortcuts through multitasking. We’ve talked about productivity before on the blog and I’ve given you some of my best tips for staying focused. This week, I want to give you some easy, inexpensive (sometimes free!) productivity power tools and techniques that will help you stay on track and get more done, more completely. Turbo-charge Your Focus It’s more effective to have short, concentrated bursts of focus than to have watered-down attention all day long. The Pomodoro Technique is one of my favorite ways to do this. With the Pomodoro Technique, you focus on a single task for 25 minutes and then give yourself a 5-minute break. After you go through four rounds of this, you give yourself a longer 20-minute break to recharge your brain. FocusBooster is an app to that uses an automatic timer to separate your ‘pomodoros’ from your rest time. It also tracks your tasks so you can see how long you spend on each project. Schedule Emails Instead of writing your emails at the exact time you send them, write them in batches and schedule them to send in the future. You save time by processing emails all at once instead of letting them distract you all day long. It also allows you to write important emails when you are most focused (maybe that’s early in the morning or at 11pm at night) and schedule them to send during appropriate business hours. Two email scheduling programs I recommend are: Boomerang RightInbox Remove Online Distractions The Internet is the fastest way to kill your productivity at work. Here are two choice programs to help eliminate the time-drain of our dear friend the world-wide web: StayFocusd limits the amount of time you can spend on certain websites each day by locking them once you’ve used up your allotted time. Anti-Social is a similar app to StayFocusd but pertains specifically to social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (the ones that can really eat up hours of your workday!) Eliminate Excuses There are many activities at the office to distract us from work, but millionaire agents go the extra mile to eliminate them. For example, instead of running down the hall (or down the block) for your next cup of coffee, why not make one at your desk instead? You can buy a personal brewer for as little as $20. With a few coffee or tea pods in your desk drawer, you can avoid hallway chatter and focus on what’s most important: more sales. Schedule Important Tasks For an alternative to the Pomodoro Technique, schedule your tasks each morning. Don’t just do this mentally – that leaves room for error – but put them into your calendar as you would an appointment with a prospect. Set reminders so you know when it’s time to switch tasks. Treating your tasks as important appointments will ensure that they get completed. iCal, Google calendar, and Outlook are all great calendar options. Create Your Perfect Week Taking the concept of treating your tasks as important appointments one step further, I encourage my students to create what I call a “Perfect Week”. As you’ll see in the chart to the right, I created a template structure for my week (at a time when I was both coaching agents and selling real estate myself) that empowered me to not only be highly work-productive, but to also get important family/personal time out of every single day and week. By chunking like activities together, and treating these chunks of time as if they were scheduled meetings, I was incredibly efficient and productive … and I got to spend plenty of time NOT working (while still making millions!) Partner Up Accountability partners are essential for keeping you on track. Choose a reliable partner to make sure you’re doing what you need to do, when you need to do it. That’s one of the perks of having a coach. We help you stay focused on the important things, and allocate your time in ways that produce real results. Find out more HERE. ___________________________________________________________________________________ You can experience different results. But it’s up to you to take the first step and make it happen. Is this the time to move from just thinking about success to achieving it with an experienced real estate coach? You can also significantly increase sales effectiveness by attending one of the biggest events in the real estate industry, The Craig Proctor Super Conference. You’ll get over 35 hours of intense training, including 20 specific how-to sessions covering every aspect of real estate sales. You’ll also get direct Q&A access to Craig Proctor and his coaching staff, and have access to his specialized technology and Internet experts. Join us in Toronto on August 15-17 or in Anaheim, California on September 12-14 and start improving your business! P.S. You can test drive my ideas and systems absolutely free by signing up for Free Weekly Training which includes live weekly webinars, a monthly newsletter and priority invitations to free half day training events. This Free Weekly training will expose you to inexpensive and highly effective methods of lead generation (with no cold calling) — what I call “Reverse Prospecting”, where qualified prospects actually hunt you down rather than the other way around. But I don’t stop at lead generation. I then show you how to follow these leads through closings via proprietary lead conversion and prospect presentation systems. My program is a complete system. I teach you everything you need to know to grow a profitable real estate business, including lead generation, follow up, presentations, when and who to hire, technology and much more. The easiest way for you to find out with no risk or obligation what my system is all about and how it can help you profitably grow your real estate business and vastly improve your quality of life is to JOIN MY FREE WEEKLY TRAINING PROGRAM HERE.