Can you relate to the feeling of, ‘There aren’t enough hours in the day”?
It’s common for property investor entrepreneurs to feel overwhelmed with To-Do’s. You know how it is- it feels like your day is never done, your workload continues to grow and there aren’t enough hours in the day.
Don’t worry this happens to all of us at some point, and probably several times a year. This is often a discussion topic in the monthly mastermind sessions that we run, and since it’s been brought up recently I thought it would be helpful to share a practical exercise I discovered last summer, and since then I gone through this simple exercise several times a quarter. I find it incredibly helpful for finding focus and prioritising the main thing. Or as we were discussing in a mastermind group the other week, finding the ‘One Thing’ for your property business and prioritising effort on that thing (ref to the book of the same name).
What I’m referring to is a simple technique for helping you find flow and deep focus, and it’s something I’ve been working on for some time now to bake it into my weekly routine.
Every week going forwards there is an approach you can take to make sure you are finding the time and getting in the right state to really progress the biggest needle moving opportunities and tasks for your context and property business.
TIME TO FIND YOUR LEVERAGE
This is a visual exercise for helping you get crystal clear about your projects and opportunities.
The aim of this exercise is to draw out clarity on where to allocate priority time for your property business by filling out this 2×2 grid.
In a word doc or spreadsheet you can make a 2×2 square grid, and label it as follows:
| High Impact | ||
| Low Impact | ||
| Low Effort | High Effort |
Here’s what to do – document every project, opportunity, task and typical weekly things you have to do in relation to your property investing business. Put it on a big white board if you have one, even an A4 piece of paper, but bullet point everything you have going on and allocate it into one of the squares according to filter of impact and effort for each item.
So as an example, the HIGH IMPACT & relatively LOW EFFORT grid would include things like:
-adding a property under management for our council client
-30 mins daily learning for my personal development
-refinancing properties to release cash
Here are some other examples I have in the other categories:
LOW IMPACT & LOW EFFORT
-email management
-managing paper mail
LOW IMPACT & HIGH EFFORT
-Month end process
-leaving the house/office to deal with operational issues
HIGH IMPACT & HIGH EFFORT
-Sourcing and analysing new mixed use investment opportunities
-Training for Lands End to John O’Groats 😊 (super high effort physically and time wise but massive impact in raising money and awareness for Cancer Research).
THE SECRET to really rebooting your productivity when you’re feeling overwhelmed is to focus on the top left [ie HIGH IMPACT & relatively LOW EFFORT], (and often at the expense of everything else for a bit of time).
You’re all busy people, many of you have kids, you’re not going to win because you worked the hardest, you’re going to win because you worked on the highest leverage stuff.
This is the mental advantage that successful property entrepreneurs have (and all entrepreneurs for that matter).
Your goal, if you choose to accept it 😁, is to commit to one major piece of work in the top 2 high impacting categories every single week.
When you know your low effort high impact things, you’ve got your key to waking up each day with crystal clarity to get started and be productive.
By plotting all your projects and tasks on this grid you eliminate the brain fuzz and second guessing that plagues most people. Instead of wondering what to do, you can get straight into it by starting with the low effort high impact and then move clockwise round the grid to finish you day on the low effort low impact. [FYI I will often start my day with the high impact and high effort things as I prefer to ‘eat that frog’ first.]
This is your key to having more productive days, weeks and months.
Now to lock in laser focus
IF YOU WANT TO LEVERAGE THIS TECHNIQUE, MAP OUT THE TIME IN YOUR DIARY TO REALLY MOVE THE NEEDLE BY PRIORITISING THE HIGH EFFORT HIGH IMPACT AND LOW EFFORT HIGH IMPACT THINGS.
Will you complete your 2×2 grid this week?