06 Sep Choice management NOT time management

When you choose to follow someone else’s plan you abandon your plan.  That can lead to bad time management.

Topic – Rik’s Fast Five

Mentor – Rik Rushton

• You choose
• How do you set up your day?
• Plan your day like you plan your holiday

Get Social – Joel Leslie

Here is how you could be hurting your brand with what you are doing on Social

Transcript:

Kevin: Every time I talk to a group of agents and ask them what they’re struggling with, they’ll tell me it’s time, putting meaningful things into their day. Rik Rushton joins me now to talk about some tips on how to overcome that.

Rik: Well, I think we’ve got to change that whole paradigm. It’s not time management Kevin. It’s choice management. So we’ve got 168 hours in the week and 86,400 seconds in the day. Where do we want to choose to focus our energies for those seconds or those hours in any give day or any given week. So I think part of that, you just have to allocate. It’s like any budget. You go, “168 hours. How many of that do I need to spend sleeping, re-energizing for the next day? How much of that do I want to spend paying love and respect to family and friends? How much of that do I want to invest in my own time, me time?” And then, the balance is what I’ve got left.

Rik: Now, how much of what I’ve got left do I want to invest in things like lead generation? How much do I want to invest in preparatory work for getting ready for appointments? How many of that do I want to spend, or how much of that time do I want to invest, if you will, in getting connected face to face, belly to belly, soul to soul with a potential buyer or a potential seller? So it’s all about choice management. You can’t manage time. You can just manage your choices. And once you make those choices, then you start focusing in those areas. Where your focus goes, energy flows. So if I’m in prep work for meeting Mr. And Mrs. Turner at 2 o’clock this afternoon at a listing opportunity, my understanding is they’re moving because they’re downsizing. They’re now looking to get closer to the– Like I’m really getting into the preparatory head space about, “Can I understand these people? Do I have the empathy to go and help these people? And do I have the data that will support my price part of that sort of proposal with these people?”

Rik: So wherever we are, we’ve just got to be there. So if we are in preparatory work, be there. If we’re on phone calls, stay on in big chunks. Yeah, chunking your time is critically important, Kevin. So you don’t jump on the phone, then jump off that, make an email, jump off that, “Can you give me an RP Data printout on Smith Street? I’m going there at 2 o’clock this afternoon.” It’s wherever you are, be there. So be on emails and off emails in chunks. Be on prep work and off prep work in chunks. Try, if you can, to get back-to-back appointments.

Rik: So I’ve found the model that works for me in choice management is AM is when I set up my business, PM is when I do it. So it’s easier said than done. And I get all that. But if we’ve got that ideal platform, that ideal week to work towards, a funny thing happens. We tend to probably stick to it a little bit. And just like a map on a highway, if we have to come off from time to time, that’s okay. We get distracted, but we know how to get back onto that freeway to where we want to get to in terms of our outcomes.

Kevin: And the reason we can get back on that freeway so easily is because we know we’ve made those choices. We know what’s important. We know what we want to focus on. Many people will walk into the office at the start of the day and just let things happen as they happen. That’s not how you get on top of the tasks, is it?

Rik: No. The best days you and I have are the days we’ve planned the day before. Like we set up this particular discussion yesterday. So we knew the topics. We knew what we wanted achieve. We knew our ideal outcomes. If we can get some great dialogue in this area, if we can get some great, maybe some mental skills in this area, then we’ve ticked that box. So best days you have are the days you have planned the day before. The best weeks are the weeks you planned the weeks before. Anyone that’s going on holidays in certainly lower east coast of Melbourne at the moment, and, you know, Victoria, Canberra, Tassie, they’re trying to get to Bali this time of the year, right? They’ll plan that weeks out. They don’t just go into the office and go, “Gee, it’s cold today. I might go see what the weather’s like in Denpasar and see if I can get on a plane.” They plan it way out.

Rik: And I think that’s what we need to be aware of here. First you make your plan, then you plan your work, and then you work your plan. And if you don’t have a plan, you’ll probably fall into someone else’s plan, which is a distraction plan. “Hey let’s go grab a coffee,” plan. “Hey, did you see if you got voted out of the house or off this show or–?” Who cares about any of that stuff. It’s not going to change my life. But it is some of the things that we need to be aware of if we’re really going to make better choice management, not time management.