Why Real Estate Agents Stay Busy But Don’t Make Money

Why does it feel like we’re always busy and struggling to make money?

There’s something I call safe work, and it’s the stuff you do in your business that makes you feel like you’re working, but doesn’t lead to actual clients. The one thing about real estate is that safe work never runs out.

There’s always paperwork to catch up on, new listings to find, stats to understand, colleagues to complain about, and contacts to organize.

You’ll never wake up with only one option for the day. Your business requires many different roles and rotating activities.

One long-term strategy is to delegate or automate these activities until you’re left with only one thing to focus on, like showing up for listing presentations or making calls.

But of course, that’s not feasible for most agents. So the question becomes: how do we stay busy doing the most important activities instead of avoiding them?

Avoidance happens when you choose to ignore one path and then take another. This can only happen if you have other paths to choose from.

Think back to when you were working a 9-5 job. Your job came with responsibilities and defined tasks to complete. Avoiding the work wasn’t an option, and if you didn’t work, you’d feel the consequences that day from your boss.

But you’re a real estate agent now, and it doesn’t work the same way. You can easily avoid doing important tasks because there’s always something else to do in your business. If you decided to skip prospecting for new clients today, it doesn’t feel so bad because you can still tell yourself you did other things to stay busy. You won’t feel the consequence of skipping prospecting until much later, when your pipeline is bone dry.

As long as your to-do list is full of easier activities instead of prospecting, you’ll do those first. Let me break down the three types of easier activities for you here:

The 3 Types of Safe Work

1. Busywork Tasks

These are things you need to do at some point, and it feels good to finish them. You can spend an entire day on these activities and still produce no money that day. This is the biggest commission-killer for most agents.

2. Trapdoor Tasks

These are activities that start off as work and then turn into distractions. Social media is the biggest one: you open the app intending to post something, but end up spending an hour scrolling. You justify it by telling yourself you’re researching or getting ideas.

3. Personal Distractions

Instead of working, you run personal errands, do things around the house, or spend time talking on the phone with anyone except potential leads, active buyers and sellers, or past clients.

The Hesitation Gap

To better understand why we all tend to pick the easier tasks, let’s look at what should happen when it comes to getting something important done.

You have a thought about something you need to do, and then you take the action.

But real life doesn’t work like this for most people, especially when the task is something we don’t really want to do. Something comes in between the thought and the action.

This avoidance happens in one moment that I call the Hesitation Gap. It’s the moment you’re supposed to start an important task, and something in your head persuades you to do something else easier. This all happens within just a few seconds.

Now your brain starts telling you things like this:

• “What if I mess up?”
• “I need to think about it more.”
• “They’re probably going to say no anyways.”
• “It can wait.”

Done enough times, it becomes an automatic loop, where you avoid the hard task and default to something easier. And since we’re surrounded by countless safe activities, it’s the easiest out for you.

How to Choose the Important Work First

I mentioned earlier that most agents aren’t in a position to delegate the bulk of their work to someone else. This means accepting the fact that you’ll be confronted with safe work every day. Since we can’t remove these activities, we have to learn how to make better decisions in the moment.

1. Any activities that expose you to strangers go first. Don’t start any safe work until this is done for the day.
2. Build a window with one option. Set a non-negotiable time and place, with only one task to do. For example, 9:15am to 10:15am, in the office with a coffee, on the phone for one hour.
3. Trapdoor tasks go last. Don’t engage in activities that can become distractions. For example, if you want to post on social media, write the post outside of the app. Post it in the evening once your day is done.
4. Report your work. If you don’t have a mentor or partner to report to, keep a visible board where you can record your completed activities for the day. Only circle the tasks you did that put you in front of new leads.

Try This For One Week

Every day for a week, write down everything you’ve done during your working hours, including time spent doing safe tasks or completely being distracted by something else. Circle only the activities that put you in front of new leads. This will give you a gauge of how much time you spent that week actually growing your business.

Also look for important tasks that you avoided and pushed to the following day. That’s the Hesitation Gap at work. The more you catch it afterwards, the easier it is to stop it happening in the moment.