The Eisenhower matrix is a productivity, prioritisation and time management framework designed to help prioritise you and your business workload.

Let’s take a moment to look at this through the eyes of an estate agent…

The matrix breaks down into four quadrants. Let’s take a look at them one by one…

‘Do’ – Tasks that are both Important & Urgent

Doing involves all of the busy stuff the agents are so so successful at. Viewings, valuations, offers, property maintenance, dealing with people, answering enquiries the whole shooting match. This is an incredibly seductive and rewarding quadrant in which a lot of our success is defined in the short term. But we as agents also have to balance our time accordingly across the other three quadrants, as spending too much time in ‘Do’ mode can actually be self-defeating.

Let’s look at the next quadrant…

‘Delegate’ – Urgent but not Important

The art of delegation doesn’t come easily to everybody.

But let’s think of it this way. If you were to set yourself an hourly rate at which you would sell your time. If you can get people to perform tasks below that hourly rate, then it will be my suggestion you look to delegate them in order for you to focus on the higher-value activities that really drive your business.

Quadrant three…

‘Schedule’ – Important but not Urgent

It’s probably fair to say, we as an industry typically spend the least amount of time in this quadrant, and it is arguably the most important. For firms to take the time to create a vision, values, business plans, training, resourcing, and forecasting, all of this sits firmly in ‘Scheduling’. If you were to look at the typical Property Academy member I would argue whilst they have an incredible ability to ‘Do’, their secret sauce and that of many other successful agencies is their ability to allocate the right amount of time into the ‘Schedule’ quadrant.

The final quadrant is that of ‘Delete’ and I have amended it slightly to also include ‘Automate’.

‘Delete / Automate’ – Not Important and Not Urgent

With the rising cost of minimum wage and the seductive nature of time-wasting activities like clicking refresh buttons and menial tasks. It is really crucial that we as agents approach these time and resource-sapping activities with extreme prejudice. If we can’t eradicate them from our business, then at the very least we need to automate them!

With my Agent Response hat on, we have dedicated our time and energies to performing a huge amount of this agency-specific automation on your behalf, allowing you to spend the time in the right quadrants of your business.

There is a wide range of these automation ideas covered throughout our Blog page.

If you’d like to learn more please don’t hesitate to give me a call.

Michael