One of the biggest mistakes that real estate agents make is becoming reactive instead of proactive while working in their day-to-day real estate businesses. While you may have the best of intentions of doing what will have you stay focused and producing outstanding results, so many things cry out to you every single day in your business trying to take you off track from producing the income and results that you know you deserve.

And if you don't watch out, you can end up becoming extremely reactive in your real estate business while this is happening.

Three of the greatest distractions that take you off track in your real estate business are your office telephone, your cell phone, and your pager. Whenever you are always available on the receiving end of these, you risk wasting a lot of your productive time. This is because you are constantly faced with many people each and every day who will contact you at any given moment in time regarding things that really don't need your immediate attention in your business.

You have the best of intentions of being productive during the day. You know what needs to be done in order for you to have a productive day, but so many people keep contacting you with requests that have little or nothing whatsoever to do with what you know needs to get done. You have a goal and a direction you want to move in, but so many people are distracting you and taking you off track. What you need in these situations is to become more of a master of your own time.

When you answer every single call that comes into your office and cell phone immediately you risk letting everyone else control your time, your business, and your life. This is also true when you feel compelled to immediately respond to any pages you receive even though it would be better for your effectiveness in your business to respond sometime later in the day. Keeping this in mind what's important for you to accomplish in all of your communications with your clients and prospects is to respond quickly to the situations that are important to accomplish your business goals while making sure that everyone you are doing business with feels that you are doing a good job of taking care of their needs.

So for some of those people who call you insisting that you drop everything you are doing to take care of their needs right now, you will want to learn how to effectively communicate to them in a way that allows you to take care of their needs in a time frame that works for both them as well as you. For oftentimes in this business people will call you insisting that something needs to be done immediately in a transaction when the truth is it that what they are asking for doesn't really need to be handled for hours or sometimes even days in order to still keep the transaction moving ahead smoothly.

So many of the calls that you receive everyday do not involve matters that have to be handled immediately. And you as an agent have to have a good intuitive sense about what needs to be handled now, and what can wait until later. The real estate business is not the stock market or the commodities trading business. Unless you are in a situation where you are negotiating in competition with others for a listing or a transaction, rarely do requests from clients and prospects truly have to be dealt with in a matter of minutes to ensure that the transaction will continue moving ahead appropriately.

Keeping this in mind you need to make sure that you're getting everything done each day, week, and month that will propel you towards having the kind of year that you want to have. This must be your first priority rather than always being available for whoever decides to contact you at any given moment during the day. If you don't make this your priority you will probably then feel that you're always extremely busy but you're not accomplishing the goals that you want to accomplish.

So become a master of managing your own time. Know which activities need to be done right now and which ones can wait. Understand that sometimes it's OK to let calls go into voicemail instead of answering them when there are important things for you to get done. You can always immediately check voicemail messages and decide if they need your immediate attention...or not.

Follow the old expression that says, "Plan your work, and work your plan." Make sure first of all that you get everything done each and every day that you know will lead to achieving the success that you desire. If you don't take control of your time and your business no one else is going to do it for you.

When you learn how to proactively accomplish the goals you set for yourself every day, week, and month while also following-up excellently with your clients and prospects, you will be well on your way to having exactly the kind of year you want to have in your real estate business.

Published: July 4, 2003

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