Creative Ideas to Improve Your Workflow
As a real estate agent or broker, your workday is often hectic. Yet, if you’re like most modern workers, you’re only able to carve out several really productive hours per day. If you’d like to experience the benefits of all eight+ hours you’re investing into your workday, read through the following creative ideas to improve your workflow. Whether you’re working from home, from your car as you run between properties, or from a brokerage location, these strategies will help you extract more results without putting in more time.
1.) Focus On Your Health
If you’re short on sleep, surviving on sugar and caffeine, or so glued to an uncomfortable office chair that you aren’t exercising regularly, your work productivity will suffer.
More importantly, your wellbeing matters! You deserve to take care of yourself. Aim for at least seven hours of sleep per night, eat a variety of healthy foods, move your body ever day, and arrange your workspace so that it has an uncluttered, ergonomic flow.
2.) Avoid Multitasking
It turns out that effective multitasking is a myth. Although those who attempt to multitask may feel as though they are accomplishing more, this rapid switching between tasks reduces the net results of all tasks involved.
If you’re working on one task, you’re already doing everything you can. If your mind is pinging between several tasks you are eager to accomplish, the next recommendation will help.
3.) Create a Simple, Prioritized Task List Daily
Check In
When you arrive to the office or dive into your work from home, set aside time to read through your emails, check your voicemail, and read through your leads. While you may need to revisit these steps several times throughout the day, it’s still important to give yourself this dedicated time. Doing so will help you feel more in control of your day.
Process Your Day’s Demands
Now that you have an idea of what your day’s demands are, take ten minutes to process them. Whether this means reading back through things you’ve marked as urgent, or enjoying a cup of tea while you think, it’s a good idea to give your mind time to prepare before you jump into the next step.
Create a Simple List of Tasks
Distill each task into a simple bullet point and place it on a list. This list can be physical or digital. Either way, you’ll need a way to prioritize and migrate tasks throughout the day, week, and month.
Prioritize Tasks
There are several ways to prioritize tasks, each of which is valid. You may prefer to prioritize by urgency, order in which communication was received, the length of time you expect each task to take, or a hybrid of all of three and possibly more!
Check Off Tasks as You Complete Them
While you don’t need to rush back to your list after every task you complete, do take time to revisit your list a few times per day. Actively reassess your priorities as you go. If you find that you’ve piled too much on your plate for the day, either reassign urgent tasks, or migrate them to the following day.
If someone is actively waiting to hear back from you, it’s all right to briefly stray from your list to send a message reassuring them that you’re working on their request and will get back to them. People are often more receptive to this technique if you include a definite time by which you’ll be in touch.
If you do adopt this approach, do your utmost to keep your word! Real estate is all about trust and communication.
4.) Document All Communication
Unless you possess the mythic ability known as photographic or eidetic memory, you’ve simply got to document all of your communications. Real estate hinges on a clear record of all interactions you’ve had with your clients, colleagues, and contacts.
5.) Send Emails and Place Phone Calls Instead of Organizing Meetings
As realtors, we often must meet with clients in-person—and we encourage all agents to do so! However, there are other times when we don’t have to interrupt our workflow with a meeting—in which case, we should opt for more efficient forms of communication.
Ask yourself: can this meeting be addressed via email, text, or phone calls? If it can, choose one of the other forms of communication.
If you absolutely must schedule an in-person meeting, keep it as brief as possible. A meeting that would be scheduled for one hour by default can likely be handled in half that time. Remember, once all participants have a handle on the topic, further communication can be mediated via one of the (more efficient) aforementioned methods.
6.) Schedule Consistent Break Times
While it may seem counterintuitive to schedule consistent breaks away from work to improve productivity, breaks serve several key purposes that will indeed improve your workflow.
Breaks enhance your focus. Unlike unplanned interruptions, which are a hindrance to your workflow, planned breaks give your brain a chance to reset for the tasks ahead.
As a result of this mental reset, breaks also rejuvenate your creativity. If you’re struggling to think of a new way to reach your target market, for example, try working on this task five minutes after you return from your break.
Finally, breaks ease stress, and we’re all more productive when we’re more at ease. This benefit doubles up when your break includes movement or a healthy snack—whichever you need at that moment.
7.) Document Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Wins
After all your hard work, take the time to review your successes. Highlight something daily, weekly, and monthly that you consider your biggest win. Include a brief note about why this accomplishment was significant, and what you can replicate to carry forward into other tasks.
Your work matters to you personally, of course, but it also benefits your team, your community, and your friends and family. We all benefit from your success, and for that, we at Parks sincerely thank you.