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Most REALTORS® are remarkably comfortable operating in a state of constant chaos. I speak to agents all the time who seem to take great pride in their “ability” to function with few or zero organizational systems.

Whether this is good for their cash flow is another question, entirely. (Hint: It’s not.)

I am not a naturally organized person, either. In fact, I think very few REALTORS® are. If we were, perhaps we would have pursued a career in accounting. Ewwww!

That said, if your goal is to complete 50+ or 100+ deals per year, you must learn to utilize some basic organizational skills to increase productivity and decrease anxiety. 

The following ideas are so ridiculously simple that if you’re not already doing them, you can start immediately. I mean today.

#1 Stop Relying on Your Memory

Have you ever made a mental note about something you needed to do, got distracted, and then completely forgot all about it? 

Has your memory ever cost you $10,000 or $20,000 (a missed opportunity to pick up a new client, for example)? 

Even if you can honestly answer “no” to that question, it’s probably only because you don’t remember!

How many ideas do you think of and forget every day—ideas that could improve your business or increase the likelihood of a future sale—that never get implemented?

Personally, I’ve got ‘Brilliant Ideas’ and Things To Do’ popping in my head like popcorn, 24/7, which I immediately write down in my Gmail Tasks List. I’ve named my list “Brain Clutter” because it allows me to get the clutter OUT of my brain and ONTO a list.

If I’m on the run, I simply tap the Tasks App on my phone and quickly write down whatever Brain Clutter I have going on. Usually, one or two words are enough to trigger my memory later, when I review the list. 

The habit of writing down thoughts and ideas prevents me from forgetting things and frees up my brain to concentrate on the big picture.

Do you ever find yourself using all your powers of concentration trying to remember six different little things? 

Out of the Brain and Onto the List

I use Gmail, but there is a Tasks List or To-Do List included with every email application, so use whatever you have already. Don’t make this more complicated than it needs to be. 

The main point is to STOP relying on your memory, and START writing things down!

(But not on cocktail napkins.)

#2 If it takes less than two minutes, DO IT NOW

Often, when you think of a simple task, the most efficient way to get it done is to DO IT NOW while it’s fresh in your mind. 

Actually, when I think of a short task, I typically write a word or two on my Brain Clutter List first; then I complete the task, then I delete it. This ensures I don’t get distracted and forget.

Plus, it’s ever so satisfying to delete tasks from my Brain Clutter List!

#3 Keep a Prospects/Current Clients List

Unless you are an absolute pro at using your CRM, I strongly recommend you keep a very basic spreadsheet with a list of all your current prospects and clients. Prospects tend to get buried deep inside our giant CRMs, so I like to view all my current clients and prospects on a single spreadsheet that I can access quickly whenever I have time.

This spreadsheet can be as simple as three columns; Column A for last names, Column B for first names, and Column C for the date and most recent activity. For example, “Feb 24 – Sent an email recommending showings this Saturday”. Simple!

I expand on this system in The Agent Skills Follow-Up module, but you can start with this Ultra Simple 3-Column Spreadsheet, and immediately feel at least 50% more organized. You will be shocked at how many prospects you would have forgotten about before implementing this simple system.

#4 Review Your Lists Regularly and Establish a Morning Routine

Now, you need to review your Tasks List and your Prospects List regularly. You can do this throughout the day whenever you have time. And, I strongly recommend adding this into your Morning Routine.

You probably already have a morning routine and don’t even realize it. For example, you sit down with your morning coffee and review your emails. Now, simply add a complete review of your Tasks List and Prospects List into your routine every morning, and take action on at least a few of the items. For example, set up an ‘Appointment with Yourself’ in your calendar to take care of Task A, and send an email to Prospect B about the new listing that just popped up. Once you’ve dealt with the item, remove it from your Task List.

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Few REALTORS® are naturally organized, but those who make the most money are the ones who learn to utilize simple organizational techniques. So try these four, and tell me I’m wrong. I double-dare you.

Just go to your task list right now, and write, “4 Simple Rules”. That’s all you need to do for now. This will trigger your memory when you read it later and have more time to implement the ideas.

If you’re thinking to yourself, “I’ll remember to do this later,” go back and read #1 again.

STOP RELYING ON YOUR MEMORY. 

For more ideas on how to stop procrastinating, read this: 5 Easy Steps for REALTORS® to Defeat Procrastination.

Are you procrastinating on updating your website, writing a new listing presentation, completing an online course, or some other major project?

Procrastination is the #1 productivity killer for almost everyone, but I think it’s even more challenging for REALTORS®, for two reasons:

1. We don’t have a boss dictating deadlines to us, and;

2. Our days are unpredictable, so it’s difficult to focus on projects that require our undivided attention.

Dr. Tim Pychyl—head of the Procrastination Research Group at Carleton University—has studied procrastination for over 25 years. Here’s what he has to say on the subject:

“Procrastination isn’t so much about our ability to manage time, but it’s actually a form of escapism, a way to cope with challenging emotions brought on by certain tasks; emotions such as boredom, anxiety, insecurity, frustration, resentment, and self-doubt.”

It’s not the task itself you are avoiding; it’s those negative emotions!

To illustrate this, just pause for a second right now and think about whatever major project you’ve been avoiding. How does it make you feel?

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See what I mean? You’re probably feeling overwhelmed and anxious. Then you start beating yourself up for avoiding the project when you know it needs to get done. But this does nothing to resolve the problem. It only makes you feel worse. 

The good news is that procrastination has nothing to do with your character, work ethic, or level of self-discipline. 

You do not need to be fixed! You don’t need to repair any psychological scars from past failures, broken promises, or unachieved ambitions.

In fact, you can fix your procrastination problem right now with these five easy steps:

Step #1 – Forgive and Forget

You don’t need to understand why you’ve procrastinated in the past. What’s done is done. Your emotions have been sabotaging you with distraction, redirection, and misdirection. Simply accept this and leave it behind.

Step #2 – Take a Tiny Baby Step

A tiny baby step is committing to work on your project for FIVE MINUTES. Not an hour. Not half a day. Five minutes. Can you do that?

Here is the key: 

Do NOT wait until you’re in the right mood. Do NOT clean up your email first. Do NOT make that one last phone call. These are all stall tactics triggered by your fear of negative emotions.

IGNORE all those distractions and, “Just do it!”.  

This could be as simple as opening up a document and writing a few preliminary notes for your website project. Or write a list of resources you need to update your listing presentation. The key is to START the work and commit to at least FIVE minutes.

This may sound ridiculously simple, but it’s also shockingly effective. Why? Because taking that first step leads you forward. It breaks through the imagined brick wall you’ve created for yourself.

In the journey of a thousand miles, it truly is the first step that seems the hardest. But once you’ve taken it, you’ll be pleasantly surprised that it was so easy. The first step leads to the second and the third. Then, all of a sudden, you can feel momentum carrying you forward.

This is why you need to make that first action as tiny as possible so that you can make it quickly with no friction and no mental or emotional negotiation required. 

Five minutes is all it takes to get started. 

Step #3 – Make an Appointment with Yourself

Once you’ve completed the first five minutes of your project, you’re going to want to keep the momentum going.

But you have to make sure that what you NEED to do is EASY to do.

One of the essential organizational skills I teach is the concept of ‘Appointments with Yourself.” These are times you’ve blocked off on your calendar to work on tasks. But here’s the key:

You must honour every Appointment with Yourself in the same way that you would honour an Appointment with Your Best Client or even an Appointment with Your Dentist.

Think about it. It’s 1:00 pm, and you’ve got a dentist appointment at 3:00. However, your client calls and wants to see a property at 3:00. Do you cancel your dentist appointment?

Of course not! You tell your client you’re booked at that time, and you schedule a different time to show the property. Why? Because you respect your dentist’s time. 

So here’s an essential personal rule you need to adopt right now:

I will honour every Appointment with Myself with the same level of respect as I treat an Appointment with Anyone Else.

Once you set an Appointment with Yourself, it is non-negotiable and non-interruptible. If you can’t agree to those terms yet, do NOT make an Appointment with Yourself.

On the other hand, don’t get all excited and set up 17 one-hour Appointments with Yourself! This is a skill that you must practice and master, just like any other skill.

For starters, book one more 5-minute Appointment with Yourself, prove to yourself that you can honour it, and then set up another one for 10 minutes or longer. The more times you follow through, the easier it will get, and the more you’ll accomplish. 

By doing this, you’re building a foundation for future success at defeating procrastination. 

Ted Tip: Always set up Appointments with Yourself on weekday mornings, when they are least likely to interfere with your clients’ needs.

Step #4 – Chunk Your Project

“Chunking” is breaking down your giant project into manageable chunks, so it doesn’t seem so overwhelming. 

Chunking is the first thing you should do when starting a big project: Chunk it out.

Then, tackle one (and only one) chunk at a time. This gives you a feeling of accomplishment and keeps you moving forward. 

Chunking also helps to minimize the emotion of feeling overwhelmed.

Step #5 – Eliminate Distractions

Imagine setting up your desk in the middle of a busy intersection and sitting down to write a novel. Cars are whizzing by blasting their horns, and more than a few drivers are leaning out their windows cursing you out. One particularly nasty fellow tosses his drink at you.

This is the equivalent of you working on your major project while your phone is going off every 30 seconds, with the TV is blaring in the background, and the dog scratching at the door, wanting in and out and in and out.

You need to eliminate all that! 

Your number one distraction? It’s your phone. You know it. I know it. Your spouse knows it. Your kids know it. Your friends know it. Hopefully, your clients don’t know it.

It’s impossible to get anything done with that thing ringing and bleeping and pinging every 15 seconds. So when you’re in an Appointment with Yourself, TURN IT OFF! You can start practicing this in your very first 5-minute session. 

And guess what? When you turn your phone back on, nothing terrible will have happened! I promise!

Also, get yourself into a quiet space, close the door, log out of your email, put on your noise-cancelling headphones, WHATEVER you need to do to eliminate ALL inputs and tugs on your attention from the outside world.

You’ll be amazed at how much work you get done, even in a short session.

As you get better and better at these skills, you will naturally look to re-engineer your environment to root out all the temptations that you once used to help you delay and procrastinate.

If you’re reading this and telling yourself, “it can’t possibly be this easy,” that’s your emotions attempting to control you, once again. 

It’s time for you to take control of your own brain and stop allowing your emotions to control what you do and what you don’t do.

Follow these five simple steps to unleash your true potential, and eliminate procrastination forever.

1. Forgive and Forget

2. Take a Tiny Baby Step

3. Make an Appointment with Yourself

4. Chunk your Project

5. Eliminate Distractions

Credit to Darren Hardy for reminding me how easy it is to defeat procrastination. I’d fallen into a rut and forgotten to follow my own advice. Hey, it happens to ALL of us! But now I’m feeling revitalized and positive, and I’m accomplishing more than I have in ages.

If I can do it, so can you!

Real Estate is a relationship-based business. And nothing degrades a relationship more than a lack of trust. 

Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships together. — Stephen R. Covey

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Real Estate can be incredibly frustrating at times, especially if your clients don’t fully trust you. Conversely, the smoothest transactions are the ones where your clients trust you completely and always follow your best advice. Am I right?

But trust isn’t black or white. There are degrees of trust. 

Tobias Lütke (CEO of Shopify) talks about the “trust battery” as a metaphor that helps you think about and visualize levels of trust.

Each time we interact with someone, we are subconsciously considering the level of charge in our trust battery, and this reflects how we respond.

This applies to ALL your relationships, including friends, family, colleagues, team members, and clients. 

Every time you have a positive interaction with a client, your trust battery gets charged. Conversely, seemingly insignificant negative events can quickly drain the trust battery. 

For example, you promised to send your client some information, but you forgot. Or, you were five minutes late for an appointment, and your client is NOT a time-optimist like you are. (What’s a time-optimist?)

There are a thousand ways to drain a trust battery. These incidents may seem minor or unimportant to you. But if your trust battery gets drained too much, it can adversely affect an important future event.

For example, in my local market (Calgary), we are in the midst of the craziest seller’s market EVER. Every good listing is selling immediately with ten or fifteen offers. I was involved in one with 28 offers recently. 

So how do your clients react when you tell them they probably need to offer $81K over asking, as I did recently? How’s your trust battery with that client? 

You see how important this is?

The above example just happens to fit the current narrative, but it’s ALWAYS important to maintain a strong trust battery with your clients.

HOW, you ask?

Integrity? Of course, BUT…

Integrity is just one of the components needed for a fully-charged trust battery. 

Think about this: Do you know anyone who is a good, honest, decent person (with high integrity) and also a gawd-awful REALTOR®? 

Yeah, me too. They have the best of intentions, but high integrity alone does not make a great agent.

Skills do. Skills and experience and mindset and hard work. When you combine those attributes with high integrity, the result is a fully charged trust battery.

Regarding mindset, think about your primary focus, first name. What drives you?

Is it getting more leads to chase? Convincing more prospects to hire you? Collecting more commission cheques?

Or, is it increasing your knowledge and skills in order to serve your clients better? If so, you already know that the commission cheques take care of themselves if you have the right attitude. 

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Confession time:

I just heard about the concept of the trust battery last week on a Darren Daily episode, and it hit me like a ton of bricks!

Luckily, when I wrote Relationship Selling and Communication Styles (two of the fourteen modules in the Master’s Program), I already possessed all the essential attributes required to build a strong trust battery.

I hadn’t thought about it when I wrote those modules, but the underlying message in both of them is all about increasing the trust between yourself and your clients. 

Remember what Stephen Covey said? Here it is again, slightly abbreviated:

Trust is the most essential ingredient in effective communication.

That means to be a great REALTOR® you MUST be a great communicator.

Luckily, fully charging the trust battery between you and your client and becoming a great communicator are 100% learnable skills. 

Ted Greenhough

Agent Skills, Corp.

I teach GOOD REALTORS® how to become GREAT REALTORS® with a simple, logical, easy-to-follow, step-by-step program.

Happy New Year!

Whenever a New Year rolls around, most of us make plans for what NEW stuff we’re going to implement into our lives. But I prefer to reflect on past lessons (the OLD stuff) and consider whether I can still apply those lessons today. Somehow it seems much easier.

At first, this message may seem like it’s got nothing to do with Real Estate, but I promise it does. In fact, it might be the most powerful lesson you can ever learn.

When I was 26, I started a wholesale motorcycle parts distribution company called Power Twins Performance Parts. ️

All I could afford to rent was a 400 sq ft mezzanine in the back of a warehouse, so every time I got an order, I had to climb up a ladder and back down again, balancing a box on my shoulder. It’s a wonder I never smashed my skull on the concrete below.

I had no idea what I was doing, so I just straight-up asked the dealers across the country, “What do I need to do to earn your business?” 

Their responses were remarkably consistent and straightforward:

“Have the parts in stock and deliver them fast!”

Alrighty, then!

Based on this, I focused on two things:

First, I vowed to have the best fill-rate in the industry. It wasn’t easy since I had extremely minimal cash flow. But I was determined. 

I watched the inventory like a hawk and placed smaller, more frequent orders with my suppliers. This often meant re-ordering on the very day I sold the ONE item I had in stock. 

Of course, this was much more work and more costly, but I offset that by quickly improving my fill-rate to over 95%; a number that was unheard of in the industry.

My customers started to take notice.

Next, I established contract rates with the major national couriers and began delivering over 90% of my shipments OVERNIGHT for FREE. (This was years before that Bezos guy started flogging books out of his garage.)

Suddenly, my little company was a trend-setter. My customers were amazed at the new standard I was setting for super-fast, reliable delivery.

My much larger fat-cat competitors stirred in their sleep and blinked just a little bit. But they must have figured it was only a matter of time before I bankrupted myself. After all, how could I possibly afford to offer free overnight shipping? 

Well, I had to run lean and mean, and I offset a portion of the extra cost with slightly higher prices.

But my customers were quite happy to pay a little more for fast, reliable service. After all, I was delivering exactly what they asked for.

My sales increased rapidly over the next few years, and I negotiated better and better rates with the couriers, so my profit margins steadily improved.

By the time my competitors finally woke up, it was too late for them. I was no longer the “little guy.” They scrambled to catch up, but I was always five steps ahead of them.

Out-Think, Out-Service, Out-Sell

Having the best fill-rate and providing the fastest delivery were two of the most important examples of how I out-serviced and out-sold my competitors, but there were many other programs I implemented over the years, all based on customer feedback.

By focusing on delivering a superior experience to my customers, I never had to worry about the bottom line. In fact, I grew my sales at an average rate of 55% every year for 14 years.  From a tiny start-up, my business eventually became the national leader in the industry, and it’s still around today, operating as Parts Canada.

So, what does all this have to do with Real Estate?  Only everything.

In business (and life), it’s all about your attitude.

When I started in Real Estate—just as in my previous career—I asked people what they wanted, and once again, the answer was simple and straightforward: 

“Better communication and guidance throughout the process” were the main answers I got. So, once again, I listened and figured out how to deliver.

Keep it Simple

My success in the motorcycle parts business was simple. I asked my customers what they wanted, and then I figured out how to deliver.

In Real Estate, it’s the same thing. Stop chasing commission cheques, and start figuring out how to deliver what people want.

“Try not to become a person of success, but rather try to become a person of value.”  — Albert Einstein

My third major life venture (Agent Skills) is where I get to SHOW you how to become a person of value. When you achieve that, success naturally follows.

It really is that simple.

Ted Greenhough,

Agent Skills, Corp.