Time management is a challenging concept even in a structured environment, let alone establishing a system when working remotely. The term is relatively straightforward, referencing the management of one’s time. Usually, people use this in relation to activities at work. When self-employed or working from home, personal and professional lives can become entangled, for instance, in the real estate industry.
The time management for real estate agents can prove daunting with the varied hats that a realtor must wear to accomplish a successful outcome. A day in a real estate firm can begin bright and early and end well after the sun goes down, with some seeing seven-day, 80-hour work weeks.
When there are not enough hours in the day to accomplish what you need to take care of, it is this instance to reassess your time management skills to see how you can organize your duties more efficiently and effectively to decrease stress and improve other aspects of your life. Let us look at tips on how to try to achieve this.
How Can You Use Effective Time Management to See Greater Life Efficiency
Everyone defines the time they have “free” around sleeping and working. It seems there are virtually never enough hours in a day to complete everything that needs to be accomplished. Fortunately, there are skills to make the days more organized and the tasks less stressful if we fine-tune them. These are time management skills.
These are different for all of us and develop over the course of period, but once established, the time spent at those unexpected last-minute meetings can be reclaimed.
It is all about how you handle the work with the personal life balance. Consider these few suggestions on better ways to manage your time so that life can run much more efficiently under every circumstance.
● Establish a daily agenda
Especially for those working remotely, the idea is to establish a daily agenda as soon as the adjustment is made to working from home to create a more structured routine.
The day should begin once there is a written plan of what the intention is for the specific hours within that workday. That does not always mean everything will go as planned. Quite often, it does not.
At the start of each day, there are goals with no reason to hesitate or waste precious moments but instead the ability to dive in. That should be the course of personal time as well. It would be best if you rose each day with a personal routine, things on a schedule that you like to accomplish before setting off to work and again after finishing with the day.
Again, write these lists, so there is no need to ruminate about what needs to be done when sleep is on the agenda at night.
● Prioritization is essential when creating the
It can be simple to create a quick list of what needs to be handled for the day, but then that list should be carefully reviewed to determine which things are a priority so time management can succeed on the work front. Anything that is pressing should be handled straight away. The things you should not be performing must be eliminated from the list and delegated to the right people.
When “importance” and “urgency” are attached to a task, these generally need to be completed immediately. That involves a job under high urgency with an essential deadline equating to the highest priority.
When tasks lack either of these traits, the goal is to remove them from the list as often as you can. That can also be true if there is an urgent task that is not of significant importance. Often these can be delegated to another individual with more time, reduced to a lesser activity, or quite possibly eliminated if it is determined someone planned poorly.
● Do not become overwhelmed by a to-do list; make sure to set time limits
Often, it is suggested that people are much more efficient if they multi-task instead of focusing merely on performing one job at a time.
Time management guidelines indicate it’s more effective to focus on each task as you come to it, not allowing other distractions on interruptions. It can prove overwhelming when attempting to start many projects without following through to complete one.
Ultimately, productivity is diminished, and time is actually lost when navigating from one project to the next with no efficient outcome for any of them timely. Similarly, to-do lists should be brief but achievable within reasonable work hours. With that said, the suggestion is to allot set timeframes to work on individual projects instead of dredging along until the task is complete.
Often people who are self-employed or working from home, like those in the real estate industry, will work extended days and weeks to complete their tasks. Go here for time management guidance for realtors.
A suggestion is to incorporate the “Pomodoro method,” involving 25-minute increments of working on the agenda followed by a brief break and then a more extended period away after finishing four tasks. The method is a popular way to keep the focus narrow while incorporating breaks throughout the day to “increase motivation and prevent mental strain.”
Final Thought
One crucial element of time management is the ability to say “no.” The only person who can recognize how much more can be feasibly added to an agenda and handled in a reasonable time is you. If it is not possible, the answer has to be no. Plus, if a project is simply not working out how it needs to, either delegate the duties or let go of it.
The suggestion is to ensure you’re completing projects routinely that produce value instead of starting multiple projects that don’t seem to get finished but instead find you jumping from one to the other each day, wasting time and resources.
Learn what’s considered the top “time wasters” in industries like real estate at https://www.liveabout.com/top-time-wasters-in-real-estate-time-management-2866538/. Effective time management at work will lead to a more efficient life overall.