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A real estate agent doesn’t have to be organized all day long in order to be a top performer — as long as they make the most of the early morning hours, Gary Keller said Wednesday at Mega Camp, Keller Williams’ annual training conference in Texas.
In a panel conversation Wednesday with three Keller Williams coaches, the company’s co-founder argued that a highly focused morning can help alleviate the anxiety of facing a day’s worth of seemingly insurmountable tasks.
“Perfection is highly overrated,” Keller said. “If you can wake up in the morning and control your day before noon, you will have the greatest life possible.”
It’s a point that Keller has been stressing for years with agents and brokers throughout his network. For top-performing agents, the most critical hours of the workday are from when they wake up to roughly noon, Keller argues. And with that time, they should focus largely on lead generation and the other activities that are most likely to result in new buyers and sellers, he said.
“I want you to be completely obnoxious about controlling that time,” Keller said. Later in the day, he added, it’s not as important to have a perfect plan for how to spend time. “It will just come to you,” he said.
Jen Davis, vice president of KW MAPS Coaching, subscribes to the philosophy as well, and teaches it to the various agents she works with.
In addition to ensuring a more productive day, the morning-centered strategy can have the added benefit of lowering agent anxiety, she said.
“In anxious times, productive activity limits your anxiety,” Davis said. “When production is high, anxiety is low.”
Having a system to ensure early productivity in the day also helps agents rest on the knowledge that they’re taking the right steps to manage their workload, Keller said. This often comes with a reassuring realization that the agent is doing all they can, especially when there are extra tasks that they just didn’t have time for that day, he added.
In the panel discussion, the coaches and Keller raised the question of how agents can fight for their time back. One long-term answer, they said, is to achieve a level of success where the agent can hire an executive assistant.
Hiring an assistant was “the first thing I did when I got money,” Keller said. It helped him manage his lead generation process, as well as say “no” to commitments that he didn’t have time for.
After noon, if an agent has had a productive morning, they’ll often find there’s little need to be as demanding or manage their time as closely, Keller said. They’ll find they can remain productive with a fraction of the stress.
“You’ll look up, and you’ll go, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been living a lie, because I was totally stressed out over the idea that successful people all day long were successful,’” Keller said. “Screw that. That’s not true. Successful people are not successful all day long.”
