Back To Basics - Part 2 - Transparency

I like to tell my agents when we talk about this, assume that you own a store, right? And so if you say out on the front door of the store that you're open from 9am to 5pm five days a week or six days a week or whatever that is, then you need to be open for business during those days. You don't need to be asleep at nine. You don't need to be getting ready for the day at nine or on the golf course at four unless you're with clients. Obviously you need to be working nine to five. You need to be in your business, working in or on your business during those times. So the first part of this, and when we talked about tracking and becoming transparent about what we do with our time is very, very simple. Go into your phone and set a 30 minute timer. Get to work. And when that 30 minute timer goes off, write down what you did for the 30 minutes previous. Hit start again, lather, rinse, repeat. Every 30 minutes, write down what you worked on during the 30 minutes prior. And if you didn't work, be honest with yourself. If you sat on your phone because you hit start the timer again, and then you noticed a little red bubble that popped up that was a Facebook notification. Hey, you played on your phone for 30 minutes. You can call it checking social media. You can call it whatever you want to, but you played on your phone for 30 minutes. Write that down. It's okay. Guess what? The death scroll happens to all of us from time to time. And we lose track of 30 minutes of our day. And we've just been playing on social media. That's okay. It happens. Just track it. What you're going to see is trends emerge, right? On when you're doing your best work, when you're not doing your best work, and you're going to be able to shift your time and your focus around to those things, but you have to have it. It has to be transparent. You have to be able to see it. There are lots of agents out there that look and feel busy for a business day, but they don't really accomplish shit. And so when they look back on the day, yeah, I did a bunch of stuff. Even people who are highly productive have those days where you're working and you're working and you're working, but you don't really accomplish anything at the end of the day. And you look back and you're like, man, where did this day go? Some people do it as a defense mechanism to keep themselves out of having to actually do the work for their business. Some of them, it just happens on a now and then basis, but we need to know. So are we tracking our day?

This is not something that you have to do forever. This is something that I would say, do it for 30 days, do it for 60 days, whatever that looks like, and start to see trends in what you do with your time and work to make it better and work to make it more effective. The other side of the tracking is how much revenue generating activity are we doing? Listen, I can sit at my computer and I can blog, I can post stuff on social media, I can do all kinds of stuff that isn't revenue generating activity. So how much of that time when you're tracking your time is being invested? I don't like to say it's time that's spent. I like to say it's time that's invested when we're doing revenue generating activity on stuff that's going to pay you back for that time. And how? So how many phone calls are you making a day? How many conversations are you having a day? How many appointments are you setting a day? And let's track those things. Because the other thing you'll see as you track and you lay transparent, the activity that you're doing is on the days that you make a lot of phone calls on the days that you actually connect with people. Those are the days you're going to set appointments and those appointments are what drive the revenue in your business. Right? And so, yeah, you can do work all day. But if you're not doing anything that's going to cause you to make money in this business, you're not going to make money in this business. It doesn't just magically happen. And so 30 minute increments are going to lay transparent what we actually do with our time. A log of our activity, a log of the number of calls we have, a log of the number of conversations, appointments, contracts, closings, whatever it is that you want to track that's revenue generating, those activities are going to be the driver of your business. And if you don't know what you're doing and you can't track it, you can't improve it. And that's the key. So that's where the transparency part comes from. I said it at the beginning. I'll say it now. It's going to hurt a little bit, especially if you get caught realizing that I'm not working that many hours a day. And guess what? You're not alone. There are a lot of Realtors like that. Or, hey, I'm not, I'm working eight hours a day, but I'm only spending an hour on revenue generating activity. And I've got to figure out how to fix that problem, which coincidentally is going to be the topic of tomorrow's third tip in our Back to Basics when we look at focus. So we'll have gone from awareness to transparency. And now we're going to talk about focusing our efforts on the things that are going to help us grow our business. So I will see you tomorrow on another episode of Top 5. Thank you for stopping by.