The first thing that you must get out of your head is the false belief that you must 'work hard' to make money. There is nothing farther from the truth than that very statement. Working hard does not make you make more money but working smarter does. J Paul Getty said, " I would rather have 1% of the efforts of 100 people than 100% of my own." These words ring true today just as they did when he spoke them. There is also nothing wrong with working smart, having fun and enjoying every hour of your work. In fact, you should be doing what you love to do, because the money will follow. Somehow we have been taught since our youth that work is some sort of drudgery and we should all be suffering during our work. This is another fallacy.


In order to change habits you must first become aware of your habits. What do you do to waste time when you could be productive. If you are not doing income producing activities 80% of your time you are not contributing to your own business. I like to have my clients look in the mirror and ask, " Would you hire you?"


One of the best rules to learn is Pareto's rule, more commonly known as the 80/20 rule. This rule states that only 20 percent of your work accounts for 80% of your output. If you don't know how and where you are spending your time, start keeping a daily journal of what you do with each 15 minute increment. Keep this journal for 2 weeks and you will see a pattern developing. Then start to accept the fact that you are wasting a lot of your time on the 80% . Start cutting away at that wasteful 80%. Even if you shift your 20% to 25% it will make a huge difference in your earning power.


Parkenson's Law is also known as 'the law of contraction'. This is a universal law of the universe and you see it in action whenever you go to get your drivers license renewed and of course many other places. This law says that no matter how much time you give someone to do a task they will fill up that time completing that task. You can give your assistant 8 hours worth of work and tell her/him that the deadline to get it all done in 4 hours it will be done in 4 hours. If you tell the same person that you need it all done in 12 hours, it will take 12 hours for her/him to do the same work he could actually accomplish in 4 hours. The reason it is called the law of contraction is because you can get more done in a shorter period of time and you will fit your tasks into the time you give them. A good test of this is when you have company coming over and your house is a mess. See how fast you get that house clean! But if you are cleaning your house on the weekends, it takes you all weekend to clean the house!


So start giving yourself deadlines to accomplish tasks. I set a timer, especially for things I do not like to do because those things we don't like to do we tend to let drag on and on. When the timer goes off, I get to stop!


Manage your energy. You can do more in a short period of time with a burst of energy than you can if you schedule a project to be completed over a period of a few days. When you do the latter you find that you get really draggy and tired and often get distracted. I like to really bust my behind on different projects and then reward myself with an hour or two of reading. Sometimes I will stay up all night to complete a project knowing that it will be finished and I can move on to something else. It is worth the initial push to get it done and enjoy the reward!


Delegate, Delegate, Delegate! This was one of the hardest lessons for me to learn. I could do it better myself so I did not want to delegate. But there are only 24 hours in a day, I do need to get some sleep and you will never increase your earning power by doing it all yourself. This is the main reason agents live a feast or famine lifestyle. They do not delegate soon enough in their careers. You should also be paying others for every thing that you are worth more for not doing. For instance, if your landscaper charges you $100 a month to mow your lawn and fertilize your lawn you calculate that he is getting paid about $15 to $20 per hour. Now figure out how much you make per hour. If it is more than what he makes you need to get your lawn mowed and stop doing it yourself. That time needs to be spent on income producing activities to increase you income. That goes for everything you are doing in your business and your personal life.


The Marginal rule of quality says that if you are a perfectionist- STOP! This is the biggest deterrent to wealth and the perfect road to poverty. If you need things so perfect to the point that it is now costing you more to produce the perfect effort than it time to let go of that dysfunctional habit. In business, you must look at your output and measure it against the gain. How long does it take you to complete a task? Again look and calculate how much you are worth on an hourly basis. Then stop making things so perfect when it does not pay you dividends to do so.


These are some simple changes you can make right now to increase your earning power, increase your income coming in and increase the amount of income you are keeping in your pocket.

Katerina Gasset, CIPS, Realtor ®, Business and Life Coach, Speaker and Author. Reach Katerina at: 561-753-0135

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