eXp Realty CEO Leo Pareja leads a company with agents and employees in 29 countries. He also keeps a spreadsheet that tracks something most CEOs don’t bother to measure: the nights he spends away from his own kids.
He caps that number at 3.5 nights a month.
On the latest episode of the Porch Swing Podcast, Pareja joined hosts Justin Benson, Lindsay Fricks, and George Laughton to talk through how he pulls that off while running a global brokerage.
The conversation covered a time-tracking exercise co-host Justin Benson swears by, the boundaries Pareja has built into his schedule, and the reps he says agents still need to put in before those boundaries work.
Here’s what agents can pull from it.
The Time Audit That Shows Agents Where Their Hours Actually Go
Benson shared an exercise he runs once a quarter to find out where his time goes. For one full week, he tracks everything he does with a time-tracking app, the kind freelancers use to log billable hours.
Benson breaks down the whole process, from the weekly log to the math that follows it.
“I actually have an exercise that I do once a quarter that my old business partner taught me. Once a quarter, I for a week straight, use one of those toggle time trackers on my computer. And I literally just track what I do every day for a week to give me the data back…(When you do that), you realize, “Oh geez, some stuff is falling out of line that needs to get fixed.”
Pareja backed that up:
“I give everyone that advice after we give them their 1099. You divide by 280 (working days). And then you can actually see what you spent your time on.”
The math behind it works like this:
- Take your total 1099 income for the year
- Divide it by 280 working days
- Compare that number to how you spent each hour during your tracked week
This gives you your real hourly rate and shows whether your calendar matches it.
Pareja said he runs this exact test on himself, and he knows from experience that the average agent spends far too little of their work time on “dollar productive” activity.
“I’d be shocked if the average agent was spending more than 30 minutes a day doing dollar productive activity, and the rest is chasing around like a chicken with their head cut off.”
He’s used tracking as a tool to ensure 60-70% of his time goes to high-leverage one-to-one or one-to-many activity, time in front of people who are already his clients or could become them.
Why Lack of Intentionality Costs Agents More Than Lack of Time
Pareja’s core argument for why so many agents feel they have no time for family (or much else besides work) is their time management. It’s how they use the time and energy they’re spending on a daily basis.
People waste a lot more time than they realize. They don’t so much lack the time as misuse it.
“If you just time block correctly—you know, wake up earlier and then still stop at 6:00 and give 6:00 to 9:00 to your family and then stay up later, right? There are sacrifices you can make that get you that.”
Quick recap: Pareja’s version of time blocking looks like this:
- Wake up earlier than everyone else
- Stop work by 6pm and protect three hours for family
- Pick work back up later if the day calls for it
He ties this back to Dave Ramsey’s old line about living like no one else now so you can live like no one else later.
Then he returns to one question he keeps asking his own team:
“Are you actually doing dollar productive behavior, which is the reps? And most people aren’t.”
The Boundaries eXp’s CEO Uses
Pareja learned early on that regular travel as a CEO wasn’t working for him. It meant spending more time away from family, and it impacted his well-being in more ways than one. So, he had a discussion with eXp founder Glenn Sanford and said he didn’t want to travel, aside from required appearances at events like eXpcon.
Sanford was fine with that. And Pareja now tracks, on an Excel spreadsheet, the number of nights per month he can’t tuck his kids in at night. He caps it at an average of 3.5.
That means same-day travel instead of overnights whenever possible.
A few examples of what Pareja’s balance looks like in practice:
- A summer built around international work trips to the UK, France and Portugal, with his whole family along for each stop
- A rule to never miss “donuts with dad” days at his kids’ school, even if it means rearranging his entire calendar
- A same-day round-trip flight to Denver, on stage by 10:30am, home by 10pm, and back in time to take his kids to school the next morning
Pareja treats his energy like a limited resource that needs active protection.
“I believe in energy as a superpower and not in crystals and essential oils, like my mom does. Just if I don’t see my humans, my energy goes down…
“But if I can tuck them in and spend time with them, take them to their stuff and hold my wife, I’m good. I have crazy stamina as long as that energy level’s up.”
Pareja’s LinkedIn tagline lists husband and father before his job title, and he says that order keeps him level-headed during the roughest weeks at eXp:
“To your comment of ‘husband and father are first,’ that is who I am first. And that’s how I feel that I stay calm and collected all the time.”
The Reps Agents Have To Put In Before Boundaries Work
Pareja earned this kind of schedule flexibility only after grinding through years most people wouldn’t put up with.
At 20, he worked 12-hour days, seven days a week, with no days off built in.
“I didn’t quit. And then normally, like every two or three months, I’d get strep throat and I’d need meds and I’d be down for like four days with a fever. And that was the cycle. But I wasn’t hurting anybody—just probably my body and not too much because I’m fine now. But I was putting in [those] reps and collecting a body of work and experience.”
Pareja draws a line between that kind of grind and the wasted busyness he criticizes elsewhere in the episode. One is intentional. The other fills empty time.
His point is that the season you’re in with your business determines what’s available to you; early career reps look different from CEO-level boundary setting.
Getting Buy-In So the Sacrifices Don’t Backfire
None of these boundaries hold up without support at home. Pareja and Fricks both raised the same point: a partner has to buy into the vision behind the schedule, or the whole arrangement falls apart.
Fricks described a moment she had with her husband as an example of this:
“Instagram was big for me. I was trying to grow on it. And every time I would pull out my phone, my husband would roll his eyes, and I was like, ‘Hey, do you want to know what Instagram has afforded us this year? This is how much I’ve sold: six figures off of Instagram this year.’ And you want to believe he changed his tune really quickly, right? He didn’t understand the vision. And so, I think it makes so much sense that you need to enroll your family, your kids, and everyone in your vision as well.”
Pareja said the same principle applies with his own kids.
“My kids have seen me speak and they’ve been to eXpcon and they understand this is what daddy does and this is what mommy does…. I go out of my way to say, you know this is not normal, right? Like your friends don’t experience these things. And sometimes dad has to be gone for a week, which is only a couple times a year. I try to minimize it, but I will move my whole calendar around not to miss donuts with dad. But in the event I have to, it’s an anomaly and they understand the trade-off that we’re doing.”
He said the same is true for his wife, Ariana.
“We have an atypical life and that’s what Ariana not only signed up for, that’s what she wanted. She wouldn’t have said yes if that was not the life I was going to pursue with her.”
Run Your Own Week Before You Set Your Next Boundary
You don’t need a spreadsheet like Pareja’s to start, though it can certainly help.
Start by picking one week before the next quarter starts and track it, hour by hour, with no editing after the fact. No embellishments. No fudging the details to make it sound more productive than it was.
The point of the exercise is finding the hours going to waste, then deciding on purpose where they should go instead.
Set one boundary based on what the week shows you. Explain the reason behind it to the people who share your schedule, then build the rest of your calendar around protecting it, the way Pareja protects his 3.5 nights a month.
