Productivity Tips For Property Investors

Productivity blog straight from “The Shard”, one of the icons of London real estate.

Productivity is one of the important factors in the success of individuals or companies.

Sudheer and I have continuously tried to improve what we have achieved in our property investment journey during our journey as property investors.

Result:

We managed to increase the number of property viewings from 4 a day to 22 a day.

This result is one of the outcomes that we achieved through our continuous improvements.

Now:

Productivity for me is to achieve better outcomes in your business, your life with the given time and resources.

While writing this post, the following questions came up:

1. Do you believe that you are productive with what you are achieving each day?
2. Are you even AWARE of what you could achieve and what you have achieved?
3. If you are aware, then what changes are you making to achieve more?

Well, above are a few questions that we all should be asking if we are serious about growing our business.

In this post, we will discuss a few productivity tips.

Please read till the end of the article and identify the order in which you want to implement these productivity tips in business or life.

Now:

There is no point in implementing all of the productivity tips at the same time.

Each one of us is different in our own way. We have our strengths and weaknesses.

How to make most of the post:

1. Review the whole post.
2. Understand and order the tips based on your personal situation and which tip will give you massive gains.
3. Create a target date to make the tip into your lifestyle should become second nature so that you continue to reap the benefits.

Now:

This post assumes that you have some goals in place, short term and long term if you haven’t thought about them, worth spending some time creating meaningful goals.

Schedule Your Day

Having clear short term and long-term goals will help you with this section of the post.

Plan your work and work your plan

– Napoleon Hill

When I plan my work the day before, the day’s has been some of the most productive days.

Few pointers on effective planning:

1. It is best to identify an app or tool that you are comfortable with. I use google calendar.
2. Create a list of tasks to be done. No surprise, I use google tasks which can be accessed from Gmail.
3. Prioritise tasks based on importance and those that give you higher value. Think about the 80/20 rule.
4. Colour code those tasks to highlight their importance.
5. Ensure there is time for unknown challenges that may be thrown at you so that you can respond to situations with ease.
6. Create a task to plan the next day and for retrospection.
7. Create a personal routine that works for you.

Manage Digital Communications And Social Media

Attention is the new currency.

Now:

How did information sharing change in the current day and age?

Gone are the days when people used to get their information from established newspapers.

In this day and age, apps are designed to create a dopamine rush with each notification.

It can be challenging for the faint-hearted to escape the grip of these apps and get something done which is useful for achieving your goals.

The amount of information that is available out there is phenomenal.

On top of it, the number of devices and applications that are streaming information straight to you has multiplied.

The challenge is not just the information, but there are hundreds of ways to analyse, perceive, and share the information. It is becoming challenging to identify the difference between facts and fiction.

Emails, TV, social media, streaming apps, mobiles, amazon fire, iPads, and the list goes on.

Now:

What are the best ways to help in this digital age?

Few pointers to how the information can work for you:

1. Be mindful of the content that you are consuming. Ask yourself a question, does the information help you in achieving your goals?
2. Plan your day when to respond to emails and spend time on social media.
3. Keep the phones and other digital accessories away when working on a task to minimise distractions.
4. Turn off all notifications of websites and apps on all devices except the one you need.
5. Move all property or investment-related group social media chats/WhatsApp groups to a different phone so that you have focused time to check and respond to the messages.

Automate Processes

While the first two tips, “Schedule your day” and “Manage Digital communications and social media”, help create a structure to your productive day and help you focus on meaningful tasks, automate processes is all about HOW you could make the most of the time.

You’re either the one that creates the automation or you’re getting automated

– Tom Preston-Werner

Every business has a set of key actions and processes to be performed to achieve the desired outcome.

Property investors have a few common repetitive tasks that need to be performed.

Listings, Viewings, offer process, Maintenance, accounting are only a few of them.

Following are a few pointers around process automation:

1. Create a list of the repetitive tasks.
2. Order the list based on one question, automating which task would give me maximum benefit, financially or saving time?
3. Check for software or teams that can help in automating the process
4. Create a plan of processes that will be automated and by when?

Delegation

Delegation is simple yet a great tip to improve your productivity.

As a small business owner property or any other business, you are the CEO, CTO, COO, CPO and 3PO(yeah, why not 😊) to start with.

Thinking aloud, one person:

1. Cannot do all the activities needed to grow business.
2. Does not have the strengths required to perform all the roles effectively.
3. Does not have the necessary skills, and the list goes on.

Agreed, when we start a business many times, we have to do everything required to start and survive until there are cash reserves. Then build a team that understands and works for the business.

“Great things in business are never done by one person, they are done by a team of people” – Steve Jobs

As business owners, we MUST know what we are best doing and create a team of experts for the rest of the skills.

Following are a few pointers to think when delegating:

1. Understand all the activities required for the business to thrive and create a list that needs to be delegated.
2. Be clear on the outcome expected from the tasks. Remember, the team needs to understand why they are doing what they are doing and the desired outcome.
3. It will help to build a team who are passionate, experienced or willing to learn the activity.
4. Do you need a team of virtual assistants or a team in your office best for you?

Retrospection

Retrospection can be applied to any of the above tips.

I cannot stress enough the art of retrospection and keep refining and improving yourself and your business.

Having been an Agile coach for my day job, if I have to lay out the steps for implementation of successful software

1. Know what to achieve.
2. Plan the tasks in detail, explaining what, who, how and by when.
3. Implement the plan.
4. Retrospect
5. Repeat

In this section of retrospection, we are trying to:

1. Become aware of how did we do?
2. Understand our strengths and weaknesses
3. Fine-tune our process and establish a system that works.

There are different flavours of the questions that would help with Retrospection

Retrospection 1:

What could I/We

1. Do well?
2. Improve?
3. Stop doing?

Retrospection 2:

What should I/We

1. Do more of?
2. Do less of?
3. Stop doing?

The outcome of Retrospection should be a list of actions or changes to the process/system that you want to implement to enhance your productivity.

From the outcome, list the top two actions or changes you would implement in the next cycle.

Conclusion

How many have you been implementing in your life?

If I have to pick one tip of this list, it would be “Retrospection”, which will drive the rest of the systems and processes in your life.

Which of the list is your favourite?

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