While building and growing a business, it is crucial that you protect your calendar at all costs. Sometimes it might feel like this is impossible to do when unforeseen tasks come up midday that need your attention, or your team members interrupt you with questions. In fact, this is just the nature of the entrepreneurship beast. However like most successful entrepreneurs, in spite of all that is going on, you must master your calendar; you must own it!

Here are some tips for how to start owning your calendar and managing your time:

• Get your biggest task completed first thing in the morning. Take action on these important tasks while you have the most energy and focus, and work until they are completed. Try time blocking this in your calendar for each morning before the rest of your day begins.

• Time Block! This is one of the most crucial pieces to being effective and efficient in managing your calendar. Time blocking is effective for truly anything that needs to get done — completing a project, catching up on emails, focusing on replying to customer requests, creating content, and more! Whether you need an hour or five hours, time blocking will help you focus on what needs to get done.

• Learn to delegate. If someone else on your team has the knowledge and capacity to complete a task, hand it off to him or her. You may even be able to outsource these tasks to a virtual assistant. Delegating allows you to focus on tasks that can only be completed by you!

• Don’t forget about the most important person… you! Add your personal appointments to your calendar. Just because these are not business related tasks does not mean they are not important.

Once you begin implementing these ‘hacks’ into the way you manage your calendar and time, you will start to see a positive shift in your focus and productivity levels. Remember: if it is not in your calendar, it does not exist!

COACH’S TIP

Time management is usually one of the top 3 biggest challenges for high producing agents that aim to grow a successful real estate team.  The reason for this is that for most that grow a team, there’s a period of time (that may actually last forever, depending on how you choose to operate) where you, as the team leader, work both “in” the business and “on” the business.  We all know what “in” the business looks like – we are in production, working directly with clients, and attending our closings. But what does it look like to work “on” a real estate business? When working on the business, your focus shifts to big picture topics like casting vision, developing your future leaders and “bench” of talent, and seeking operational efficiencies through high level system analysis.  It is easy to schedule our “in the business” activities…but it more challenging to schedule “on the business” tasks like analyzing your team’s future growth! Book it anyways. Literally, the block within your calendar should read “forecasting the future”. You may be simply sitting for an hour in front of a whiteboard just brainstorming things. That’s great! I promise you that you may not be able to track your “on the business” activities like you track the number of contacts made that day on the dialer, but you are making progress and taking advantage of a focused time block!