We always have more to do than time to do it. That’s why time management is probably the largest component of the $19 billion self-help market.

It is also often a central component for the training and coaching of real estate investors. You see, when you start doing more of the right things on a daily basis, you’ll see huge performance gains.

My goal in this article is to provide you with the best resources and share my top takeaways from numerous books, years of courses and seminars, and all the real-world practice of techniques I’ve learned as a long-time real estate investor.

Why Time Management?

We all start each day with a very limited number of hours. During those hours we have many options of what we can do with our time. Pareto principle (also known as “The 80/20 Rule”) would suggest that 20% of the possible activities will produce 80% of your results. I think the numbers could be even more extreme.

Regardless, the goal of time management for real estate investors is to do MORE than 20% of the activities and LESS of the time-wasting ones.

Fighting the vampires of time

The other challenge we face, to use Dan Kennedy’s terminology, is the Time Vampires. These are the people who are constantly trying to suck your time like a vampire sucks the blood of his victim. We need to have hypervigilant senses, and to be constantly alert and avoid these people.

Why is it SO important specifically for real estate investors?

As entrepreneurs, it’s almost as if we have a magnetic field that attracts time wasters. Nobody is micromanaging us, and we are free to waste time in epic proportions if we choose.

That makes it even more important that we manage our time effectively to get all the income-generating tasks done. Instead, one of two things often happens to us:

1. We don’t generate as much income as we could or, worse still, as much as we need.

2. We end the workday (you have one, right?) with a feeling of incompleteness.

Poor revenue generation doesn’t require much explanation, but the second challenge could…

A feeling of incompleteness

This is a nasty problem faced by real estate investors who don’t manage their time properly. It goes like this… it’s 5pm, the end of the working day for most of the busy world.

They are traveling home and most have already forgotten about the office and started thinking about family, TV, a cold beer or whatever they look forward to at the end of the day.

You, on the other hand, get this horrible feeling, like the day just flew by and you didn’t do anything important.

There are 2 options at this point…keep working through the night or call it a day, even if you get stuck thinking about work/feeling like a failure/feeling overwhelmed/etc. Tell yourself you’ll do better tomorrow… but you won’t.

This is the dirtiest part of real estate investing… not having a regular work day/week, taking stress home with you, feeling like you can never keep up with everything that needs to be done.

You identify? If so, you have a time management problem… read on.

Can’t I just hire an assistant?

You may think the problem is that there just isn’t enough of you to go around, and the answer is to hire help.

Well, if you can’t manage your time, how will you manage theirs? Instead, get a grip on your time management, and if you still need help, you’ll be working flat out and getting maximum ROI.

Time Management Education

So if we can agree that you need to manage your time better, it’s to start learning some specific strategies and implement them in your real estate investment business.

I have invested in A LOT of resources trying to master time management, from cheap books to super expensive seminars. What have I found? Most of the concepts taught in expensive seminars come from cheap books. There… cat out of the bag.

So, here are 4 resources (plus a bonus), that will cover what the high-priced programs (for real estate investors and also the personal growth crowd) cover for next to nothing. If you want even more distilled details for real estate investors, please look for my other article, Real Estate Investors: Top 3 Time Management Strategies.

Find all of these books at your library or on Amazon.com for around $10-15 each. They are in the order I read them.

1. No BS Time Management for Entrepreneurs by Dan Kennedy – This is a great book for under $10…essential reading. Best for on the go… avoid the time vampires and block your time (allocate a portion and then turn off everything else).

2. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen – The “GTDers” manual (people who use the methodologies described in this book. My systems incorporate GTD methods. The best takeaways… the system for organizing paperwork into actionable and reference, and the idea of ​​separating the immediate from someday/maybe

3. Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Work Week – This was the “it” book for a while, as we all dreamed of working fewer hours. Read it for some great practical strategies, especially for limiting time wasted on email and outsourcing. The best takeout… tame your email.

4. Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways To Stop Procrastinating And Get More Done In Less Time By Brian Tracy – I summarized this book at #2 in Real Estate Investors: Top 3 Time Management Strategies. This is the much longer version. Best takeaway…focus on frogs (do the important stuff before the easy/fun stuff).

The fifth resource would be any of Franklin Covey’s time management books/classes/resources. I started with these and they worked pretty well for a while, but I will say that I am no longer crazy about the level of detail and the size of the task lists. I also found all the talk about rocks and saws a bit obtuse.

More tips to optimize time management in your real estate investment business