What distractions are controlling your schedule?

It’s hard to believe that this year is almost gone, and I hope each of you understand the importance of working through the end of the year.

The year does not end on December 1^st, it ends on Dec 31^st.

Last week, Sabrina and I were in Moscow, Russia. I was doing a three-day event, the complete listing workshop. We had about 400 agents in the room. It was an incredible audience, great experience for us and great experience for them.

On day two, we had four people approach me. There were only about 4-5 that spoke English out of the 400+ people and they walked up early in the morning and I asked, “What can I do for you?”

They were like most of you, very professionally dressed, sharp people and they said to me in a broken English, “How do we master a good, productive schedule?” Which I think all of us understands is a never-ending, non-stop battle that all of us have to fight.

“You have to master not letting distractions run your day or run your life, because the truth is real estate people are the masters of letting distractions run their day and their life.”

They looked at me with a bit of a head tilt like it was a question mark and one of them said, “well, I’m not sure I understand what you mean by letting distractions run our lives.”

I asked them what time they show up for work in the office. One said 7:30, one said 9:30 and two said 10. When you get to the office what is your purpose, what are you trying to accomplish? They all said they are trying to find people that want to buy or sell homes.

Your business in Russia is the same as our business in North America. You get to the office 9, you fiddle with your computer, check your voicemail, check your emails quickly, and get yourself ready to go to work, what happens next? Do you have a starting point to the productive side of your day?

They asked, “what do you mean?”

Do you have a point that you start your day, whether that be role-play and practice, answering messages from the day before, lead follow-up, prospecting; do you have particular thing you have to do?

They said no.

Next, I asked them, “Well then, what do you think we should do?”

They replied, “Based on knowing Mike Ferry, we should prospect.”

What distractions get in the way of you doing your job between 9 and noon on a normal day?

They weren’t sure because of the accent and the translation what I was saying, so I gave them some examples.

1. Emails, you’re sitting at your office, ready to prospect and call expired listings, your computer is on and an email pops up. You look at the email, that’s a distraction. Then, you choose to read it, that’s a bigger distraction. Then you decide to answer it and that’s the biggest distraction. By the time you press send and before you can get your finger away from send, they respond, another distraction.
2. You have your phone sitting on your desk and you get a text and your eyes look down at the text. That’s a distraction. Your cell phone rings and of course the phone number comes up, oh do I want to talk to that person? I don’t think so. That’s a distraction.
3. Agents walk by while you’re sitting in your office preparing. You have your headset on, your scripts in your hand, you’ve already role-played and practiced. You’re ready to go to work and an agent walks by and asks you a question. That’s a distraction.
4. Deals sitting on your desk. You’ve got three deals pending, the files are sitting on your desk. Why are they on your desk?
5. You have four listings; those files are sitting on your desk. Why are they sitting on your desk? You’re inviting more distractions. You’re looking for something to distract you.
6. You pick up the phone, you call a FSBO and you look down at a transaction. You remember you have to call Ms. Smith! And then you forget what you’re talking about with the FSBO. That’s a distraction.
7. Not having a schedule is a distraction.
8. Not having any strong goals to keep you working all day long is a distraction.
9. Complacency is a distraction.
10. Not time blocking is a distraction.

I went through these with them and they were looking at me like they were sorry they asked, and I understood that response.

Really, the ability to manage your time comes down to our ability to understand two words in the English language.

I asked them to tell me what these two words are in Russian. I gave the two words in English, they gave me back the two words in Russian and believe me I did not understand what they were saying, but their body language told me.

If you want to master your schedule, learn to FOCUS 100% on the task at hand when you’re supposed to be doing your job which means you have your cell phone turned off, your iPad turned over. You clean off your desk of the files and the listings that you have.

You focus on the job at hand, because there’s nothing there to distract you. You put a stop sign up on the edge of your desk, it just says “STOP” so when an agent walks by and sees the word stop, they don’t stop and bother you. Or, you put your headset on and you turn away from the aisle where an agent could walk up and distract you.

The second word is discipline. The ability to be disciplined to do your job.

Let’s be honest, discipline is hard. I asked these people if they work five days or six, they all said they work five. If you could be focused on your schedule from the time you arrive until noon, three days out of five, what would happen to your production? They all smiled and said, “it would go up.”

What if you had the discipline to follow your schedule from the time you arrive until noon four days out of five, what would happen? They said their production would be even bigger. I asked them if they’d like it to be bigger. They said yes!

Take the word “focus” and put it on a 3×5 card, and on the back of the card write the word “discipline” and put a copy in your pocket, purse, wallet, tape one to your computer that is turned off, on the mirror. Once we drive those two words deeply into our subconscious mind, we’re going to start becoming more focused on the schedule and we’ll be more disciplined to accomplish what’s on the schedule.

I think I probably overwhelmed them in about ten minutes, and I may have overwhelmed some of you. The advantage you have is that you can watch this message twice or three times a day for the next seven days.

The name of the game is time management

After doing the fun work that I do with all of you for 43+ years, still today, the number one problem for the average real estate person is time management and that is because, of course, we are independent contractors.

As long as we’re independent contractors and don’t think like an employee or don’t have strong goals to force us to work every day and the discipline and focus to follow a schedule, as long as we don’t have that, time management will always be a problem.

Even the best agents in the world, they still will tell me they need to always be working on their time management.

Remove the distractions.

Look at your work environment, how many distractions do you have that are inviting you not to participate in your schedule? Master your schedule, master your business, master your production, and you’ll master your life.