A routine is something that you do on a regular basis, such as your grocery shopping every Friday or paying your bills on the second Thursday of every month.
Introducing routines into your work-life is a powerful habit-forming technique to ensure you get all your important work done consistently. For example, let’s say you commit to sending an Activity Report to all your listing clients every Monday morning. If you want to maintain credibility and build trust, you must stick to your planned routine.
You can’t just do it sometimes! You can’t just sluff it off to Tuesday or Wednesday one week because you got busy. You’ve trained your clients to expect that report every Monday morning.
When you make a commitment, you lose credibility when you don’t live up to it. But how do you ensure you stick to your pre-set routines?
One of my rules is that I treat every “appointment with myself” with equal importance to how I treat an appointment with my best client.
What’s an appointment with myself? It’s a task that is time-sensitive. If I don’t get it done now, I must move that task to my calendar and assign a certain day and time to complete it. Once a task is on my calendar, I have no choice but to do that task when it is assigned. Why?
Because of the self-imposed rules that I’ve assigned to myself to ensure I get stuff done.
What about you?
Let’s say you have any one of these appointments at 3 p.m. this afternoon.
- A listing appointment
- A dentist appointment
- A coffee appointment to chat with your No. 1 client and best referral source
Now, it’s 11 a.m., and you get a call from a buyer wanting to see a property at 3 p.m. Would you cancel any of these appointments above to accommodate that buyer?
Of course not! You would simply tell the buyer that you already have an important appointment at that time, and you’d work out a different time. Right?
But what if your 3 p.m. appointment was an appointment with yourself? What would you do?
I’m guessing you would say, “no problem!” and you’d book the appointment for 3 p.m. with your buyer. You’d tell yourself you can do that thing you had booked with yourself another time.
You must stop doing this. Right now!
Start treating yourself with the same level of respect as you treat others.
Simply treat the appointment with yourself like any other important appointment. Tell your buyer client you’re already booked and figure out a different time to show the property.
What about routines?
A routine is simply a recurring appointment with yourself. Every routine has a specific day and time when it gets done.
Like this blog post, for example. I’m writing this on Monday morning because that’s my routine. I never have to think about what I’m doing on Monday morning because I know that I’m writing my blog post right after my morning routine, which is this:
- Review and respond to messages
- Review my calendar for today and the upcoming week
- Review my Clear Brain System (see my website for details)
I don’t remember the last time I skipped a week on my blog post.
Routines are powerful and habit-forming.
So what about that weekly activity report to your seller clients?
Time to adopt some rules and routines.
After Ted Greenhough’s first year as a Realtor, he earned between $590,000-$865,000 every year for 12 consecutive years, all as an individual agent, without ever once making a cold call, reciting a canned script or doing any other “salesy” stuff. Now he runs Agent Skills, an online learning program for agents across North America.
