Ep# 42: Getting Started With Time Blocking

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Go check it out right now, visit LOKestudy.com and download your free copy today. Mortgage Marketing Radio Brought to you by the Mortgage Marketing Institute, your number one source for truth in mortgage marketing. Hey listeners, it's Jeff, it's him for welcome to this week's episode of Mortgage Marketing Radio. It's been a bit of a delay in being with you and getting back to the podcast and that's because we've got some really cool developments coming your way very soon. I'll give you a little hint, a little sneak, a reveal and it has to do with video. That's right. Getting back to the video. So stay tuned for that. I'm going to be launching actually a weekly series called Mortgage Marketing TV and you'll be seeing more and hearing more about that coming very soon. I've figured it makes sense to expand and use the platform as a video as well as this platform of audio. So we'll be doing some interesting things on Facebook, Facebook live, tying in some YouTube there as well and involving users, special guests, viewers, your input, your feedback is always welcome and appreciate it. That's what drives everything here. So today it's just you and I, no special guest, special guest coming up on the next episode. I'll get details about that very soon, but today I just wanted to take a couple of minutes and talk about a topic that's been coming up quite frequently on my coaching calls with loan officers across the country and that is this concept of time blocking, time blocking. Perhaps just the very thought of it sends you into a corner, cowering in no, please don't make me time block by calendar or don't make me block out that time and focus. Well, I'm here to tell you that the things I hear most often from loan officers is how do I get more done in a day? How do I be productive? How do I get off the rollercoaster ride of I generate some loans and some business and then I stop marketing and stop getting out in the field and stop promoting and getting in front of referral partners and doing those key things because I'm busy focused on the loans and process and I'm busy dealing with all those issues and I can never seem to get back to the things I need to do and there are things we definitely need to do in our business, particularly sales and prospecting, depending on where you're at in your business, sales and prospecting is a daily at best discipline that should be done and practiced and perfected every single day. But what I hear is most don't do it on a consistent basis. What's the reason, distractions, interruptions, take it off the grid, off course, the time stealers, if you will. I'd like to present to you an ongoing series, a dialogue, a communication between us. Because time blocking is such an extensive and involved topic, it can't be handled in just one quick podcast episode. I want to set the stage up for if you want to learn more about time blocking and setting priorities and adding structure to your daily routine so you can get the things done you need to get done. If that's relevant and important to you, then let me know. Leave a comment in the show notes, leave a rating on iTunes, let us know if you like it, send me an email, info at mortgagemarketinginstitute.com, always look forward to hearing from you, but let's talk a little bit about time blocking and why it's so important and so relevant. I want to give you some tips and first of all kind of set the stage for time blocking because you have to have this concept of time blocking and it starts with an example I heard from someone else. And by the way, if you're looking for a great book that will help you focus, it's called The One Thing by Gary Keller. So some of the things I'll be talking about will be excerpts from that, different trainings and resources they've got, but I'm going to break it down for you and customize it for us as mortgage loan officers here in the business. But I want you to think about this, okay? And this will help deal with the issue of why you get distracted when you're trying to schedule the time for what you claim to be the important must-doze in your business, or at least they should be, must-doze. And that is this. If you had an appointment with somebody that, let's just say you're ideal client, let's see you had an appointment with a top realtor that you've been working for months or years to get in front of. Let's say you had an appointment with somebody, a financial planner, who you knew was going to whether it's this financial planner or realtor, but they were going to literally have a major impact in your business because of the relationship, because of the referrals that you'd be getting. Picture yourself having a meeting scheduled with that person, or picture yourself having a meeting scheduled with your wife for an anniversary dinner. Or imagine you've been waiting a year for this very special event that you got tickets to a year ago. You paid a lot of money for them. You've been waiting for this. It's one of the most favorite events and experiences, whether it's a concert, a play, a show, whatever it is. And yeah, you've got these tickets, or now you're meeting with this referral partner, or it's your anniversary dinner with your wife. And somebody calls you and says, hey, can you meet with me Thursday at seven o'clock? I'd like to go over something with you. And you tell them, it's my anniversary. Oh, oh, oh, I'm sorry, yeah, so maybe we could do it on Friday at three o'clock. What I want to instill in you is that what you have there, when you've got those important advances, you've got an appointment with yourself. And if you talk to a potential referral partner, you tell them, oh, no, I can't meet with you because I got to go walk the dogs at seven o'clock at night. Well, how's that going to look, right? Not very good. Or if you tell them, I've promised my kids I take them out for ice cream at seven o'clock on Thursday night. They're going to probably hopefully recognize as that's important and valuable. But look, here's what I'm saying. Time blocking is about making an appointment with yourself. And too often we allow ourselves to be interrupted by the disruptions of others. And so if you simply respond to somebody, when you look at your calendar and look to see your availability, you can simply number one, tell people, I'm sorry, I have an appointment at that time. Now that appointment is your time blocked period. What have you time blocked on your calendar? That's an appointment with yourself. And it's a very important appointment. Now it can also be appointments, obviously, with other people like the examples I gave you. We'll talk more about that. But for the sake of just day-to-day business and getting your stuff done, making your calls, meeting with your processor, your loan officer, assistant to do pipeline reviews, getting belly-to-belly with referral partners, building your business plan, strategizing about your business. Those are very important meetings, appointments with yourself. So I want you to number one, look at it from that light. Okay? And number two, when you're looking at time blocking your calendar, you've got to really decide what are those activities or things that you must get done on a daily basis, whether it's to generate one loan referral a day, whether it's make your 10, 20, 30, 40 calls a day. What are those uncompromisable, non-negotiables that you've got to get done and begin to look at your schedule, your calendar? We'll dive into more into proper scheduling and structuring of your day. But begin to look at your calendar and look at those small time blocks. I want you to just, you know, when you get started with time blocking, start small. Okay? Don't block out three hours of time because it's pretty difficult to work consistently for three hours with no breaks, with focusing on that, you know, just for three continuous hours. If you can do it great, more power to you. Studies and research show, though, that the most highly productive, efficient people do not work for extended three hours blocks of times without any breaks. They work for short bits of time and you can build up your muscles over time, but here's my advice to you. Start with just a small time block, say 30 minutes, okay? 30 minutes to focus on your one thing needs, right? What are the one thing, those one things that you need to get done and structure those in a single time block on a single aspect of your day, your daily routine that you need to get done? What you'll find is, when you schedule them in these short, focused time block periods that you are number one, your energy tends to be higher, right? You're much more focused because you know that you're not going to be, you know, it's okay to whatever those little interruptions are that are clamoring for your attention, the phone call, the email, the whatever, right? You'll know that, hey, it's only 30 minutes. So it's not like, oh my gosh, you have to drop this because I'm going to be making calls for the next six hours all day. No, I'm only focused for 30 minutes. So we can let those other interruptions and distractions go by the way side, okay? So number one, take a look at your calendar, map out the next month, the next 30 days, and block out a few different periods, a few different times throughout the day for 30 minutes each of when you're going to get the focused work done. Now, obviously you choose what it is, but I'm going to assume if you're like many, right? It's the calls, it's the meetings, it's the prospecting, right? As most elbows I talk to, probably are falling short on the outbound prospecting efforts they need to do in whatever fashion or shape that is, right? Because they're too often busy being distracted and interrupted. If you take a look at the typical day, if you picture a pizza, right, yummy pizza, if you picture a pizza, you know how you slice the pizza into different triangle shapes, well, so we've got this whole entire pizza, it's our entire day, right? And if you just take one slice of pizza out, for most people, that one slice of pizza, the amount of time they spend on a typical day focusing on their important tasks and activities. And so what do you have the rest of the day? The rest of that huge pizza is everything else, oftentimes, unproductive time, right? So a productive pizza, if you will, a productive viewpoint of your day and using this wonderful pizza analogy is cut the pizza in half, on one half, you've got the critical things, the core things, your one thing that you need to focus on on a given day. The other half of the pizza is everything else. How much more productive would you be? How much more successful? How much more money would you make? How many more would you get more results if you simply increased the time in a given day that you focus on your high-priority tasks? Obviously answer, we all know that, right? So how do you do it? How do you structure time-block it? Get out your calendar. Decide what are the most non-negotiable things that you must do every single day. Time block them on your calendar. Again, I'm suggesting you start with just 30 minutes because those are short bites, right? They're little snackable bites of block time that you can begin to build your block time muscles with, okay? And I want you to also evaluate, when are you best during your day? Are you a morning person? You tend to have more energy in the morning versus the later afternoon. The reason why is because if you're going to make calls, you want to do it when you're at your best. If you're going to be making presentations, you want to do it when you're at your best, when you're at your most effective, when all the cylinders are firing. And the problem is there's this old concept that whatever time that's allotted or given for us to complete a task is usually the amount of time it takes. So what do I mean by that? What I mean is every day you know you've got calls to make. Let's say you've got 20 calls to make to realtors, referral partners, past customers. If you haven't time blocked those into specific segments of your day, guess how long those 20 calls take on average? Pretty much all day. Why? Because you're not in control of your time. You're not in control of your calendar and your focus and your activities. You're allowing the other people, you know those people. The external world to be in control of your calendar and your time. And therefore, you're allowing yourself to be constantly interrupted and taken off track. And did you know that when being interrupted and focusing on a different task, even if it's just for a few minutes, it takes an average of 20 minutes to get back into that previous task, multiply that by three, four, five times a day. And we're talking hours of lost productivity time, okay? So number one, I want you to look at when you're most effective in your day, when your energy is the highest and schedule, you know, Brian Tracy in his book called Eat That Frog, talked about eating that frog first thing in the morning, okay? And so what we want to do is use our time most efficiently. So if I got to make calls, outbound calls, I'm going to do it when I'm feeling as much energy as I can. Later in the day, three or four o'clock, that's more for me personally, the administrative type stuff, right? The following up with emails, the checking on loans and process in my loan processing software or whatever it is, or maybe it's posting some stuff on social media, right? Those things don't really require that much mental capacity for us. Okay, that's tip number one, tip number two, build a bunker, build a bunker. You've got to set up your defenses, right? And minimize distractions because we all have distractions. They come at us every single day. So you've got to build a bunker, find that place, that quiet, happy place where you can get your focus time. Is that in your office? I don't know. Maybe it's at home. Maybe it's somewhere else, but you've got to build a bunker around you and set it up so that during that block time, you're not going to allow interruptions. So that means for your internal team, perhaps, I know what I do is I put a big sign on my door that says, time block, do not interrupt. And what I do is I set up the parameters with my team with everybody that I work with about what is an acceptable interruption. And it's typically anything that's fire trucker ambulance involved, okay? Those are usually the only things that get through and get an interruption. That's how important I want you to consider time blocking, okay? So build a bunker, set up the expectations with your team and other people that you work with, your processor, your loan office assistant, you know, your team, your juniors, anybody else you've got, right, your spouse, even your kids to that point. And this is where you get very specific in your strategy, like voicemail, for instance. Talk to a lot of loan officers, what about realtors? I got to call from realtor, I have to take that call, do you? How many times have you heard people use a voicemail successfully that says, hi, this is Jeff with ABC loans, your call is very important to me. However, between the hours of X and Y, I will be returning phone calls. Outside of that, I'll be working with clients. If this is urgent and is regarding a loan in process, now you've got some options, right? Hit star pound, they'd be connected to my assistant. Call 999-423-456 to connect yourself with my assistant loan processor. Or you can text me at this number if it is urgent. So what I'm saying is, you can let these calls go to voicemail and provide direction and communication for them via voicemail. So that now you're in control because how many times do you take that call and it's a call that really wasn't urgent, you know, from the Stephen Covey's book, there's the seven habits of highly successful people, right? There's these four different quads, right? There's urgent and important. There's not important. There's important. Well, most people are coming at us thinking their stuff is urgent and important when it's more often than not only important. So urgent is things like fire truck, ambulance, loan blowing up and the buyers are at escrow signing paperwork, okay? That's urgent and important. But much of the stuff in our average day is not urgent. The house is not on fire, no one's injured, no one's in an accident. What's urgent? Well, that's for you to decide. But depending on the state of your business, your one thing might be the urgent thing, the calls you make, the connections, the engagement you continue to drive with your referral partners, the meetings you have, the face to faces, okay? One other quick tip, make sure you store provisions. So what I mean by this is get your area set up for success, right? Build a bunker. Talk about that. Create a perimeter, create a wall, right? So that you have your locked in and you're not going to be susceptible to all those interruptions and noise and distractions and then set up the communication plan with everybody that's relevant and then secondly store provisions, okay? Do not be walking out of your bunker to grab water, to grab a snack, to get a breath of fresh air, okay? If you need water, keep it in your bunker. If you think you're going to need a snack during your block time, keep it in your bunker. Because as soon as you walk outside that bunker, you get assaulted, you get attacked by the enemy, the enemy is distractions, the enemy is other people's alleged priorities. You've got to set yourself up for success and efficiency. And the last thing I'll share with you is this, make sure you reward yourself. Use short time blocks that you're going to start with, these 20 minute, 30 minute time blocks, okay? Take a break at the end of that. And you can even set up your day in several 30 minute chunks of time, right? You can block, you can schedule these out. As I said earlier, it doesn't have to be a three hour slog of a time block. That's not very effective in productive, you know what's effective in productive, right? Work solid and focused and committed, uninterrupted and get it done for 30 minutes and then take a break. Take a five for 10 minute break. Take a breather. Take a walk. Get outside. Get some sunshine. Do some pull ups. Do some burpees. Okay? Whatever's going to renew your energy. But if you got another time block scheduled, right? Come back. Come back. Refreshed. Renewed. Go back into your bunker and repeat the process. Some of the successful schedules I've seen have this process repeated every single day where we're blocking out three, four, five, six blocks of time. And what happens is over time, as you build up your time blocking muscles, start with 20, 30 minutes, right? You'll get stronger. You'll get better. You build that consistency. You'll build that deep well of reserve. So now that you can go for longer times of time blocks. So you can eventually build to an hour if you want. But again, looking at the research, right? You want to stay really highly productive, highly energized, highly laser focused and mentally, you know, with it and checked in versus checked out and just going through the motions. You've got to manage your state, you've got to manage your state and keep your state high. And how do you do that? You set yourself up for success. You set up your bunker. You eliminate minimize distractions. You set up your support by communicating. It's block time with your team. What does that mean? Who gets in? Who doesn't get in? What are the parameters for being interrupted if at all? Remember, fire truck ambulance. And so begin to do this, okay? Check it out. I'll put an example, a couple examples of some time block calendars of what this looks like. You can even make a color coded, right? You can make your prospecting call time block green. You can make other things blue, yellow, purple, right? If you've got any association of emotions to colors. But this, by the way, this is something that is you want to set it up on a recurring basis on your calendar, okay? This is something that doesn't just happen once. You repeat this. I want you to test this for 30 days, right? Now, some things on your calendar might only be a time block once. Maybe it's only something you've got to do once and that's okay, right? But much of what we need to do to be consistent and productive in this business is that we need to block them off regularly every day, every week, right? So if it's a regular thing, you need to do the calls, the appointments, the meeting with your processor and assistant to manage your pipeline. Imagine what could happen if you met with your assistant just briefly every day. For 10 minutes, 15 minutes, depending on your pipeline size, the number of loans in your pipeline. I know some loan officers would meet twice a day once in the morning, once in the break before end of day. Maybe it's for you three times a week. Too often, most loan officers aren't managing their pipeline with a block time, a block time actual appointment with your support team. So you know, every single week during this time, these days, during the week, I'm going through my pipeline. Now, with that minimize questions, with that minimize surprises, with that minimize, I don't know, I gotcha is, right, questions. With that, keep things tighter when it's when you're chasing conditions, okay? So it all comes back to a system, okay? And then each day ask yourself, okay, you've got your regular time blocks, regular thing that's happening every day, so it becomes a habit, right? You're using those times when you're most high energy and highly efficient. So those things you've got to do every single day, I want you to go block those off in your calendar for 20, 30 minutes at the end of listening to this. And I want you to block it off on a recurring basis. You've got to make those calls, pick the days you're going to make them three days a week, five days a week, your call, pick the times, set it up in your calendar, block it out, and schedule it, recurring, infinity. Put it into your daily method of operation now. And as you approach every day, this is where you begin to get better and build your muscles, ask yourself the focusing question. What is the one thing that I could do that if I did would make everything else easier or go away? That's essentially the question from Gary Keller's book, The One Thing. Again, if you haven't read it, I suggest you do. I'll put a link in the show notes to it if you want to buy it on Amazon, great $20 investment in your business. So build your bunker, communicate with your team, store provisions, and just do it. Just do it and see if you like the results, see if you are more effective, more productive and more focused. It's okay to let those calls go during your time block. It's not the end of the world. Last tip, you can even ask your agents, hey, barring any emergency, is it okay that if and when you do call me, if it goes to voicemail, we have an expectation set of the turnaround call time. Mr. and Mrs. Agent, I want to be there to serve you and be responsive and you know I'm 100% committed to stellar responsive, timely customer service. I've already demonstrated that for you. Have I not? Yes, you have. Great. So I'm implementing time blocking into my calendar and I just wanted to check with you because you're one of my most important partners. Should you call me or someone on your team call me? What's your expectation for a return call time? Because when I'm doing time blocking, you know how important that is, Mr. and Mrs. Agent time blocking, right? Yes, I do. Great. I'm time blocking. That's obviously a structured set of my day where I don't take calls and interruptions unless it's an emergency. So I'd like to ask you what your expectation is in those situations. Is it a 30 minute callback? Is it a one hour callback? And let them talk. See what they say. I think you'll be surprised. I think they'll tell you, hey, you know, if it's not an emergency or for now, you know, some blowing up thing in the pipeline or whatever, it's all right. I mean, you don't call me back in a half hour or whatever it is, right? So I'll leave you with that. If you'd like this, let me know. Leave a comment in the show notes. If you like this podcast, you've been listening for a while. Do me a favor. Leave me a rating on iTunes, little five star if you think we're up for it. This just helps us get recognized as doing good for others in the mortgages industry. So that's that. Check the show notes for links, sample calendars. By the way, if you want to email me your sample time block calendar, that would be great. Tell me anytime about anything info at mortgagemarketinginstitute.com and as always, I appreciate and value you. Now go out there, block some time on your calendar, get some stuff done, and I'll see you on the next episode. Bye for now. 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