Selling your home: Organize and prioritize your time

You will need to give up some of your spare time in order to get your house ready to sell and to show prospective buyers through it.

That's why it's important to gain control of your time and use it wisely. It is easy for days to "just slip away" without having made much progress in selling your house. Being busy and being productive are two different things.

In some ways selling your own home can be likened to being under "house arrest." But think of how much you could save in commission by doing the jobs an agent would normally do!

One way to boost efficiency is to prioritize tasks. Draw four squares on a piece of paper. Mark the squares as follows:

• IMPORTANT AND URGENT

• IMPORTANT BUT NOT URGENT

• UNIMPORTANT BUT URGENT

• UNIMPORTANT AND NOT URGENT

Now put each of your daily tasks into one of the four boxes.

The point I'm making is that it is important to prioritize your tasks and know the value of everything you do. Why I say this is because most of us spend too much of our time working in the wrong squares.

We do tasks that are IMPORTANT AND URGENT because we have to. That's good!!!

We do tasks that are UNIMPORTANT BUT URGENT, because they demand our attention. Things like personal phone calls etc.

We do things that are UNIMPORTANT AND NOT URGENT because we want to... they are a good way to pass the day and can be fun. Again phone calls can be in this category, so can reading irrelevant mail, clowning around, trivia, gossip, escape activities like TV etc.

Most of us don't spend enough time doing things that are IMPORTANT BUT NOT URGENT.

Eg. Prevention, forward planning, relationship building, preparation, goal setting, devising marketing strategies, cash flow budgeting, setting values and standards, introducing efficient systems etc.

We often put IMPORTANT tasks off because they are NOT URGENT or get overshadowed by the day-to-day activities in our lives.

Selling your house is IMPORTANT and URGENT. You are either going to do it or you are not! So spending more time on tasks that are IMPORTANT and either URGENT or NOT URGENT will prove to be productive.