If you’re looking to get more production out of your day, you need to start subtracting.

I recently had a meeting with one of our amazing team members and the topic of the meeting was scaling the business: growing the business, completing more transactions, getting more income—all of which you can sign me up for right away. 

That’s what I’m all about—growing your business. But the truth is, it’s not an easy environment to do that in right now. 

Subtract What’s Not Working

Most people, when they want to scale their business, talk about adding: adding lead pillars, adding more income-producing activities, adding things to their schedule that will take up more time. 

But in a lot of cases, subtracting the things that aren’t income-producing is an even more effective strategy than adding things that are.

Most people tend to spend 20% of their time on income-producing activities and 80% of their time on the stuff that keeps the business going.

What ends up happening is people get so involved in being the best at paperwork (and you should be good at paperwork by the way), that they forget about being the most productive. 

In order to do that, it’s not about adding another lead pillar or adding more activities, it’s about subtracting. 

So I’ve got three things here that you can subtract from your schedule right now, or at least condense, so that you can expand the amount of time you spend on income-producing activities.

#1 – Active Client Maintenance

Active client maintenance should be time blocked in your schedule every day. 

With this, I’m talking about active listings and active buyers. You already have the client, you want to maintain the client. These calls are critical to your business but they need to be done outside of the best times to make calls for lead generation, which I talked about in this post. 

So I’d be time blocking these calls between 11 am – 12 pm if possible, or early afternoon, between 12:00 – 1:00 pm.  This allows you to get ahead of your clients so that you are not stressed out about calling them. 

What also happens is those calls can sometimes be 5, 10, or 20 minutes long. And when you’re having those conversations with people, you want to make sure that you have the proper time allotted for them and it doesn’t take away from something that’s going to make you more money. I’d be time-blocking that into a client maintenance block on my calendar that’s timed. 

#2 – Follow Up Tasks

Every agent has a list of follow up tasks in the CRM, whether it’s sending video emails or gathering property information. 

Instead of doing these things all right on the spot, tell your clients when they can expect to hear from you and send it by then. 

Time block a follow up block for another hour in your calendar where you’re doing the administrative part of the follow up: sending disclosures, sending property information, recording follow up videos, and making sure that the next steps are clearly prepared for. 

This should also be time blocked into your calendar because if you start doing these tasks when you should be making calls, you’re costing yourself money by taking time away from talking to new people and setting new appointments.

#3 – Negotiations

Negotiating is part of your job—but you don’t work for the other agent. Other agents will interrupt you. They’ll call you at 8:00 pm; they’ll call first thing in the morning. You need to have a time block in your calendar strictly for negotiations (or group it with your block for current client calls).

The point is—while all of this stuff is important—it all leads to transactions and sales contracts, it can get in the way of talking to new people and setting new appointments. So, time blocking these activities at appropriate times condenses that activity and keeps your lead generation time slots clear. 

And that will help you be more productive and drive more revenue.