The Four Hour Work Week in real estate
My holiday reading this year was so inspiring I just have to share it with you. I highly recommend you buy a copy of The Four Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferris.
Step 1 – Process of Elimination
Pareto Principle
§ Quantify 20% of the activities that produce 80% of your desired outcomes
§ Determine the 20% of activities & people that are consuming 80% of your time
§ Apply 80/20 rule to customers, work tasks, personal chores, friends etc
§ The goal is to:
1. Find your inefficiencies in order to eliminate them, and
2. Find your strengths; those critical few tasks in order to multiply them
Working every minute of every hour between 9 to 5pm isn’t the goal. That’s simply a structure that has become a habit for most In the knowledge economy. It’s important to shift from presence to performance, cut out static (all the things that consume time and income without return on investment). You’ll find that very few things matter.
Step 2 – Cultivating Selective Ignorance
· Shift to a low information diet. As an example I cleaned out my internet “favourites” that were increasingly eating my time.
· Avoid “all input” and “no output”.
· A more effective approach is to catch up with “news & data” when required, instead of constantly keeping up.
· Let things wait – especially email! Nothing is really that urgent.
· Be more efficient using an email auto-response system. Send an email to s.koerber@barfoot.co.nz to see mine.
· Give yourself room to single task and focus on the mission-critical tasks (or as we know it, Dollar Productive Activity) without interruptions.
Step 3 – Outsourcing your life
· Avoid doing $20 per hour tasks if you’re worth $120 or more per hour. Get a PA or VA.
· If you earn $100,000p.a in real estate and on average work 3 “effective dollar productive” hours per working day, assuming 1 day off per week and 5 weeks holiday, you would “work” a total of 831 hours per year. This equates to $120 per hour.
· Most honest hard-working salespeople create a false reality and believe they “work” 8 or 10 hour days. It’s bollocks!
· If you think you “work” an 8 hour day and you’re actually above average and do 3 hours dollar-productive activity per day, then you’re desecrating 5 hours per day of your life. How would your family or spouse feel about you “going to work” if they knew the truth?
· Assuming you earn $100,000 per year, and today, between 1pm and 2pm you wrote an ad, stuffed some envelopes, read some emails, and talked to your manager – those activities earned you $0. The 3 “dollar productive” hours you hopefully achieved are the ones that gave you your $360 today.
· Resolve not to work for no reward. At the very least, resolve to spend your unproductive hours with friends/family or relaxing on the beach – not in the office pretending to work.
In Summary
It’s smart to focus on getting things done, but it’s only possible when you set your “not to-do list”. Remove the constant distractions and static and focus on the critical few dollar productive activities (DPA) – there really aren’t that many!
Real Estate DPA is simple. Ask yourself how many of the following activities are you scheduling and performing. More importantly, ask yourself how many $20 per hour activities fill your days – outside the following key activities in order of priority:
· Prospecting
· Listing
· Negotiating
· Selling and keeping deals together
Remember, all of the rules we follow (outside of the rules of science) are rules we set ourselves. So set yourself up to win and choose your own rules.