Bruce Lee once said, “It’s not the daily increase, but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.”
Robert Kiyosaki advises people to “FOCUS: Follow One Course Until Successful.”
The phrasing may change, but the message remains the same: Simplify. Declutter. Focus. For real estate agents, who so often have to-do lists a mile long, this is great advice that can be hard to follow. Even when you really want to minimize your daily tasks and declutter your environment, it can be hard to make it a priority.
Sometimes, small changes are easier to stick to than sweeping resolutions. To help you out, we’ve compiled three quick changes you can make to start hacking away at the unessential.
Ditch a losing strategy. Marketing gurus often advise you to analyze your business to find out where most of your revenue is coming from, and focus more effectively on your best strategies. And that’s great advice… Once you’ve got the time. Until you’re able to collect the data or run the numbers, though, it may be a lot easier to cut a losing strategy than to determine a winning one. After all, if a tactic never seems to bring you leads or clients, then it’s not a good fit for you.
Do the “unsubscribe” sweep. Sure, there are some great strategies out there for getting your inbox to zero. But sometimes, just the idea of dealing with your unread emails is exhausting. You can help clear out the backlog – and prevent so much of it from piling up in the future – by running an inbox search for the word “unsubscribe”. This should pull up all of your newsletters and mass emails. Be ruthless: if you’re not actually reading them, unsubscribe and delete all unread. You might be surprised at how relieved you are to not have those emails hanging over your head.
Delegate simple tasks. There comes a point in your business where it doesn’t make sense to do everything yourself anymore. Usually, people reach this point earlier than they realize. Your time is limited, so it makes sense to focus on those parts of the job where you can bring the make the biggest impact, and automate where you can. Real estate postcard mailing and EDDM campaigns are two ways that you can get important parts of your business taken care of, without spending huge amounts of time.
As with any change you make, the more you practice focusing the easier it will be. Look for opportunities to simplify, eliminate, and outsource wherever possible, and you may be surprised how much more time you can free up to focus on growing your business.