As a real estate investor, prioritizing your tasks can be a daunting and exhausting challenge. It can be very easy to spend several hours moving from activity to activity without really accomplishing anything. Soon enough, at the end of the week or the end of the month, you will be left wondering what happened to your time and where your next deal will come from. The most obvious solution is to prioritize what is important to you in relation to what will have the biggest impact on your bottom line. If you focus on things that are really important, you will find yourself much more productive.
Everything you do throughout the course of a day will either enhance your business or cause it to take a step back. There is a big distinction between doing things that will have a long term impact on your business, such as setting up meetings and networking, and accomplishing tasks that will have an immediate impact. You need to strive for a steady mix of new leads coming in, offers going out and deals going to closing. Accordingly, you should always do something that will have an impact on one of those three areas.
Once you breakdown the segments of your business cycle, breakdown what you need to do to achieve success in each respective area. You can fool yourself into thinking you are working hard because you are busy accomplishing small tasks, but this doesn’t make it true. Just because you are getting caught up with a mailing or with evaluating a deal doesn’t mean you are working hard.
With an abundance of technology and resources available, you should be able to move in and out of tasks faster than ever. There are virtual assistants and many other ways you can outsource most of your important “busywork.” As an entrepreneur, you need to stick with what is really important and focus on the areas that will benefit your business the greatest. If networking is a strength of yours, make a point to meet one new contact every week. If you do this for six weeks, you will start to see tangible benefits that will help you grow your business. Websites or business cards are important, but you don’t need to spend your whole day on them.
It is easy to forget that you are building a business when you are involved in the day to day investing world. If it was easy, everyone would be a successful investor. However, this business is difficult and takes a lot of hard work. Time management skill are one of the hidden strengths many successful investors share. They know where and what to outsource and they know what they should be doing themselves and when. The longer you are in the business, the easier this will become, but you can help the process if you focus on your business cycle and what you do every day to contribute to it.
There are only so many hours in a day. You would be wise to use them productively. If you remember this every day and keep focused on things that will really make a difference, your business will greatly benefit.
