The Time of Your Life

As a real estate investor, it’s pretty darn important to actively manage your time, just like you should manage any assets you have, to get the greatest and biggest return possible. Time is possibly the most important assets all of us have since it does have limits and is not, for us, endless. Plus, if you don’t watch and manage your time carefully it can be taken away from you without you even noticing.

To benefit the most from the time you do have, you can really stretch your time by organizing it.  If you want to squeeze every dollar, pleasure, fulfillment and sense of accomplishment out of the minutes you do have, you must organize your time to the best of your ability and or have others organize things for you.

We’ve all heard that people can’t be in two places at once or do two things at the same time, but that’s not correct.  You really can be in two places and or do two things at the same time. How is that possible?  It’s called “delegation” and, wow, does it ever work.

You can greatly multiply yourself and what you can accomplish by delegating to other people.  Here’s a few “do’s and don’ts” that have helped me buy, manage and sell millions of dollars’ worth of real estate.

1. DO delegate specific tasks to others whose time costs the business less than your time.
2. DO provide accurate instructions plus a target completion time or date when delegating.
3. DO the hard tasks yourself that would cost more to delegate than for you to do.
4. DO discipline yourself not to do tasks that you’ve already delegated or should delegate.
5. DON’T let the task be given back to you uncompleted without an acceptable reason.
6. DON’T let a delegated task be postponed. Periodically follow up each task you’ve delegated based on reminder notes you’ve made.
7. DON’T over supervise. Look for acceptable progress and results.
8. DO take time and the effort to carefully pick the best people for that tasks you need done.  Plus, carefully think through the best rewards that will push and motivate the person to deliver the results you want.

Keep these points in mind and you are sure to find that you will have more time for the things you want to do as well as increasing your ability to complete more in your investments, business, and life in general.

Delegate to Expand Your World

Last week I wrote about the power of delegation and how it can greatly magnify and expand your world whether it’s business or social or charitable.  Your first thought may be “wait a minute I don’t have a staff of workers to delegate to and I certainly don’t have the extra money to hire anyone, so how can I do it?”

The good news is you don’t need a staff or an assistant and you don’t need to hire anyone.  There are literally millions of people out there that are willing and able to take on tasks for other people and even do it for free.

Just look around and you will see people everywhere working hard for something they believe in but aren’t getting paid for.  You see it in folks that work for the PTA, for churches, little league baseball–soccer and football, boy scouts and girl scouts and even in demanding positions like apartment and condo association presidents and their directors.

Your task, if you want to expand your world, is to do a lot of work thinking and planning to find and pick good dependable people that are qualified and have natural talents fit for the tasks you give them.

Anything that takes up your time that you wish you didn’t have to do, can be delegated to all kinds of people directly around you as well. As your kids, grand kids, spouses, friends and neighbors. If you are asking them to do something for you and that something is their passion and they are really good at it, there is a very good chance they will do it and happily. These will greatly expanding your list of delegatee.

I am not saying that it is easy.  Thinking and planning can be hard work but again the rewards and the great expansion of your life can be well worth the efforts.  It’s fascinating to study the lives of many great business and civic leaders and see how they started with a small group of people that worked for nothing or very small compensation because they were totally turned on by the project that they were working on together. It’s all about finding what things people do that makes them happy and allowing yourself to let them gain more joy by doing these things for you!