We all know that as real estate agents, we wear many hats.
As independent business owners, you may have to handle marketing, appointment setting, meeting with clients, listing appointments, and transactions. It can be a ton of things to do in a single day, and that doesn’t even consider your personal life and family obligations.
If you aren’t strategic about your work day, the problem is that you could miss important deadlines, focus too much on a task that takes time away from other goals and tasks, and you could find that work becomes a more significant part of your day.
By figuring out a time-blocking strategy, you’ll be better off keeping a work/life balance and being able to grow your business more effectively.
What Is Time Blocking?
Time blocking is a tactic that sets aside a portion of time to focus on a specific task during a set time frame. If you’re trying to manage your workday, time blocking is helpful to set priorities, helping make you more efficient.
For example, if you have to handle marketing, appointment setting, contract writing, and making sure you get your transactions across the finish line, you’ll be overwhelmed, and things will fall through the cracks without a plan.
To make a plan to be more productive, you want to create schedules for your entire day, both in your business and your life.
Time blocking is setting a specific time to handle every task on your calendar. By setting a particular timeframe to perform a task, you will be more efficient with your time and efforts.
Let’s say you’ll create some content to use in your marketing. You would time block a couple of hours in your day to work on that content. For example, if you’re creating a video, you might time block 9-11 AM to write, film, and edit the basic video with the idea that you’ll post the video sometime later.
Time blocking by another name is time management. You need to learn time management by making specific goals and routines, prioritizing the tasks at hand, breaking down those tasks into smaller micro-tasks, and having a particular strategy to complete those tasks.
The advantage of time-blocking is that it allows you to focus on a specific task for a set amount of time to be the most efficient and productive you can be during your allotted time.
The Pomodoro Technique
When you are time-blocking your day, basically what you’ve done is create little sets of time to achieve specific tasks. Then, taking this strategy even further, you take those couple hours you dedicate to a particular task into smaller tasks.
As you break down your tasks into smaller chunks of time, you can complete more tasks, and if you were to reward yourself with a little break after some time, you’d be even more productive.
The concept behind the Pomodoro Technique is the idea of breaking your time into smaller portions with a built-in break.
The Pomodoro Technique is a time-blocking strategy that goes like this:
Set a timer for 20 minutes. Work exclusively on one task for that 20 minutes. At the conclusion of the 20 minutes, take a 5-minute break, and don’t do anything related to the tasks you’re working on.
The idea is that you spend 20 minutes of high focus and high productivity and then take a 5-minute break to let your brain relax and recover. So basically, you’re taking smaller slices of time and dedicating all your mental energies to accomplishing your tasks.
Set A Daily Routine
Creating a daily routine helps you create a schedule throughout the day to focus your energy and attention on the tasks at hand. It also allows you to prioritize your tasks into what is important, urgent, not important, and not urgent.
Knowing what is a priority allows you to fit those tasks into your daily routine, creating momentum in those activities that eventually become habits.
For example, if you work out first thing in the morning, then you already know how to time-block part of your day. Therefore, what you prioritize as the first thing to do in the morning is a strategy you should apply to the rest of your work day.
Set time in your routine for yourself. It could be taking time to exercise, meet with friends, help the kids with homework, or whatever is important to you on a personal level. Don’t let work creep into this personal time; don’t let personal time spill into your work time blocks.
Write It Down
When you’re working on time-blocking and routines, one of the more important tactics to stay on track is to write it down.
Create a time block to analyze and plan your business strategy and what you plan to do in each time block.
Writing down each time block and what you hope to accomplish during that time provides an incentive to complete that task. Accomplishments provide powerful incentives that excite and motivate you to do more.
Take your tasks and go “micro” on your planning, making your tasks smaller and more specific. The smaller the task, the quicker and easier to accomplish, making those the building blocks toward achieving even more.
Micro-planning and time-blocking for small tasks quickly add up to larger accomplishments. Each accomplishment creates momentum to achieve something more. And your productivity will skyrocket if you use time-blocking techniques and the Pomodoro Technique.
Find A Mentor And Coach
Make yourself more accountable by writing down your schedule and finding a person to share your goals with and help keep you on track when you lack the motivation.
Finding a more experienced real estate agent to work with, whether in your brokerage or outside your office. Often a mentor has systems in place that they can show you and teach you, as well as help you set up your time management and blocking systems so that you can achieve maximum productivity.
A coach will help you learn the most efficient ways to time block, how to implement time management systems, how to plan micro-tasks, and utilize the Pomodoro Method to its fullest.
A good coach will also work to keep you on track and accountable in various phases of your business, and part of your time blocking should include making time to interact with your mentor and coach.
How To Create A Time Block Strategy
Now that you understand the perks of time blocking, how do you set one up?
It’s relatively easy to set up a time block strategy. Simply identify what you want to accomplish during the day, how long those tasks will take, and how much “wiggle room” you have in your daily schedule; review and update your time block plan; make your plan concrete by writing it down or putting it into a calendar app.
- What tasks need to be accomplished?
Decide what your tasks are and prioritize them. Once you decide what is important and what isn’t, create a list of micro-tasks you want to achieve.
For example, if you need to do some lead generation, you can plan to film some video and post it on social media.
So in your time blocking, you would prioritize writing your script, filming your video, editing it, and posting it on social media. Each of those tasks adds up to the larger task of posting the video on social media.
- How much time will your tasks take?
The next phase of time blocking is estimating how long each task will take. Some things like posting content to Facebook or sending a text take next to no time. Filming and editing a video is the larger chunk of time to get the video completed.
- How much wiggle room do you have?
As you time block, you may see that you underestimated how long your task may take. So you build a little wiggle room in your calendar for the inevitable things that take more time.
- Review your schedule and revise it.
Once you have an idea of your daily schedule, review it and see if some tweaks can be made. After you have the general outline of your time blocks, as you work through them, don’t be afraid to make little changes and revisions in your overall scheduled blocks. For example, you may find that some tasks take more time than others and that you need to add or subtract items from your list.
- Publish your time-blocking plan
Once you’ve created your schedule and time block strategy, publish it by writing it down or using a calendar app. The power of writing your strategy down makes it more concrete for you and shareable with your mentor and coach.
Time blocking is a time management skill that makes your day much more manageable. As a real estate agent, you have a ton on your plate. Finding the most efficient ways to complete your tasks and increase your productivity takes an intentional strategy and accountability to your goals.
