04 Jul What tasks to prioritise

Good time management is about doing the most productive activity and delaying or dumping the others.

Topic – Mastering time management

Mentor – Danelle Hunter

• work out what tasks are most important
• sales contracts – finalise same day
• prospecting

Transcript:

Kevin: As we talk this week with Danelle Hunter who is a Director of Biggin and Scott in Knox about time management. It’s pretty important to understand what tasks need to be prioritised. We helped you with that a little bit yesterday by talking about marking these important, and nonnegotiable items in your diary, and making sure you stick to them. Good morning Danelle, welcome back into the show again.

Danelle Hunter: Thanks, Kevin.

Kevin: Let’s talk about what tasks should be prioritised. Help us with that a bit, Danelle.

Danelle Hunter: Okay, so I think it’s different for everybody depending where you’re at in your sales career. Obviously, if you’re starting out then your tasks are basically prospecting. You need to focus on making calls, door knocking, finding ways to get in front of people.

Danelle Hunter: Obviously, appraisals are important so I would say appraisals, contracts, so you’re selling properties, and open the more important things, and keeping your customers happy. Making sure that you’re keeping in contact with them every day, or you currently listings you should be speaking to your vendors constantly.

Danelle Hunter: If you mark out an hour a day for example, to call all of your vendors, and give them an update then at least from a customer service point of view keeping them happy. Obviously, offers, and that can come in at any time so there are things that you just have to fit in as quickly as you can on the day that it comes in.

Danelle Hunter: But just yeah, making time for your appraisals, and making time to prospects ’cause prospecting is important to your job to be getting more listings. So you’ve obviously gotta stay on top of that, and not get weighted down with paperwork, and doing the other side of it, and then forgetting about prospecting because you’ve got too much paperwork to do.

Kevin: It’s a good point you make there about how the priorities change, or the task priorities change depending on how advanced you are in your career. As an example, you as the Director, and you’re operating a number of offices, your list of tasks prioritised would be totally different from say mine, or a new person starting in real estate.

Danelle Hunter: Yeah, definitely. I had a new sales agent say to me the other day, “Oh, I haven’t had much time to do prospecting.” I said, “Well, what are doing?” I said, “You actually don’t have anything to be doing other than prospecting. You don’t have a listing, and so you’ve got nothing to sell so you need to just be getting out there, getting in front of people.”

Danelle Hunter: I think that’s where people with distractions, and that as well, they get distracted with other things staff are doing in the office, and they don’t prioritise their time properly. The same with older sales agents that have been in it longer.

Danelle Hunter: Sometimes they might only have four listings, and I hear, “Oh, we need a PA, we don’t have enough time.” Well, if you prioritise your tasks properly, four listings you shouldn’t need a PA. It’s like barely enough for one person to deal with.

Kevin: Yes. Yeah, you mentioned this yesterday about eliminating distractions, and it really is the key is identifying those distractions, and then going about eliminating them because as you made that point there about a person saying, “I haven’t got time to prospect,” they genuinely think they are busy, but they’re not productive, and that’s the difference.

Danelle Hunter: No.

Kevin: Yeah.

Danelle Hunter: Yeah, no you gotta be productive with your time. And that’s I don’t speak, me, and my PA we’re both pretty much the same, and it’s great. We don’t speak to each other about general stuff. It’s sort of like, “Hi, how are you,” and then we just get down to it. Then we ask each other questions if we need to know something.

Danelle Hunter: But we’re just working the whole time. There’s no, if someone comes into our office, and wants to just have a chat with, we can’t think of anything worse. We’re like, we’ve got too much to do, we just wanna keep doing it. I think that’s where most people would just be happy to have a chat, and then half an hour goes by, and then they’ve lost time, and then they’re running behind with everything.

Kevin: Yeah, wow, that’s fantastic. A great insight there. Danelle Hunter is our guest all this week from Biggin and Scott in Knox. We’re talking about time management. More than that we’re talking about becoming productive. Tomorrow when we come back, we’re gonna look at some good time management tips, that will help you become productive, and the things that you can, the tasks that you can really manipulate to make sure that you are productive. Danelle, we’ll look forward to talking to you again tomorrow morning. Thanks for your time.

Danelle Hunter: Thank you.