By the time the next issue hits the streets on October 30th, the cold fronts will be coming down from up north and we’ll start forgetting about these “dog” days of summer that won’t go away!  So, start getting changes over to me this week. 

Did you know that we are part of a national network of real estate publications that receives over 250,000 monthly visits with an average visit of nearly 7 minutes per visit and over 4 million page views.  Over 200 independent magazines participate in this network. 

If you are a current advertiser and use the website we created for you, your listings are automatically upload each night to Google, Yahoo, Secondspace, Oodle,Trulia, Zillow, Enormo Overstock.com, Properazzi and exlusivley on USAHomeSearch.org which is comprised of nearly 100 unique websites in our network of magazine publishers.  Incoming web traffic is monitored and you can even be notified when your listings are viewed on these partner sites.

As always…if you have questions or need help uploading ad, call me at 561-585-4722

janelle

Just a note to let you know the lastest issue Volume 6 Issue 2 has been distributed to all of the Publix locations and the street distribution should be done by the end of the week.  If your office was missed and you would like some copies, just drop us a line at info@sfreguide.com or call us at 561-585-4722. Below is  our most recent article from Our Business Coach, Nancy Proffitt.  Her articles are always full of good advice to use in our business and personal lives.  Enjoy!

Are you Managing Time…or Is It Managing You???

Does your “to do” list seem to grow longer and longer?    

Do you ever feel overwhelmed, overworked or unappreciated?    

Is your desk covered with tons of work to be done, projects to review and letters that require a response?             

How about all those email! This applies to home as well as work.

If you frequently work hard all day and still get little accomplished, you need to get organized. If important matters are regularly pushed aside, so that you can put out fires or address a crisis; you need to get organized.

Effective time management will give you the focus to get more done… in less time and regain control to live a life that provides you with tangible and intangible rewards you desire and deserve.

The term “time management” is in itself an anomaly as we truly can not manage time, we can only manage ourselves. After all, there are always 24 hours in a day  60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute…..every single person gets the same amount of time each day. While the fact is each of us only has a certain number of days on earth and that number varies person to person, one fact does apply : some people get more out of just a few days, while others seem to spend a lifetime accomplishing little. How we manage ourselves within any given time limit is all a matter of attitudes, behaviors and goals.

Because most of what we do in any given day is by habit, our attitudes, which are habits of thought, have a lot to do with achieving our goals. Our behaviors are the vehicle for our attitudes.  By developing a time conscious attitude we might have to adjust our behaviors to accomplish our goals, especially as it relates to managing time.

For instance, if your goal is to achieve outstanding success, but you devote minimal hours and average efforts to work, then your behavior is inconsistent with your goals. So it is not that there is not enough time, we just haven’t developed the right attitude and behaviors to gain the most from it.

Time, you see, has two dimensions: hours and energy. To be successful you must organize both.  There is no secret to effective time management. Many techniques work and it doesn’t matter if you use a paper based system or a PDA. What matters is not what system you use, but that you use a system.

You must learn to prioritize your activities and set meaningful goals.  You must adapt a system that works for you, so YOU can achieve more in less time, therefore, having more discretionary time to enjoy the fruits of your labors.

In an effort to see where your time goes, play a little game and do a time analysis by writing down everything you do during a 24 hour period. Write the times down in 30 minute increments on the left hand side of a page from the time you get up until you go to sleep at night and then across the top of a page in separate columns, name each task you do daily. Be sure to name a column across the top of everything you regularly do including  a column for “other”. Record your activities for 5 days. Recording exactly how you spend your time is an important discovery process. You may find that you have a very inaccurate and unclear understanding of just how you actually spend your time.

Yakking at the water cooler, junk emails, extended telephone calls (personal and business) and watching television instead of reading that book that will help you toward your goals, may all be examples of things that are not time focused and that is time we will NEVER get back. How many of these types of time wasters were on you own time analysis matrix?  Once a moment passes, it is gone forever. How many moments do you have left?  If during your time analysis you discovered 3 hours of wasted time a day ( this is very  probable!) , ask yourself, “ Would I strike a match and burn 3 one hundred dollar bills a day” ?

Your time is so valuable. To use it wisely, you must be organized and systematic in how you spend it. Good time management or more accurately, managing “you” within a time frame, can be accomplished by changing those negative behaviors and attitudes and knowing your goals and purpose in life. Just as knowledge is not power unless you do something with that knowledge, time is not manageable unless you have systematic way of managing yourself in time to reach the goals you desire.

Nancy Proffitt, MBA, Certified Business Coach is the
president of Proffitt Management Solutions and Proffitt Management Leadership Institute, an internationallyrecognized Leadership coaching firm dedicated to unleashing the full potential of individuals and organizations.
She may be reached at 561-682-6060 or
email:Nancy@proffittmanagement.com .
Visit her website at
www.proffittmanagement.co

We are happy to hear that agents who have loaded their listings up to the website we have created for them are having leads generated to them thru the Toll Free 800 #.  I’ll be sending a note out next week..we want to track what is working for you!  If you are a current advertiser, this is a FREE lead generating tool we offer to you.  Please call the office if you have questions about the program.

Also, in the next week we are going to be switching over and sending out notices thru a new email system…Constant Contact. We want to send out a weekly newsletter along with when it’s time to send ad copy in and we’ve gotten great feedback from some of you and  other friends in business who use their program.  Our website will stay the same, but our notices will be a tad different:)

If you have questions or need help…please call me at 561-585-4722.  Ok..get busy and start getting your changes over to me at info@sfreguide.com

Have a great week!

janelle

If you go into a Publix over the weekend and do not see any magazines, please send us an email at info@sfreguide.com and we will make sure that rack will be stocked.  If you have a location you would like us to drop magazines at just let us know and we’ll be happy to add it to our distribution route.

Have a safe Labor Day!

If you need help, please call the office at 954-415-6326

Street date for Volume 6 Issue 1 is September 4th!

Did You Know When You Advertise With Us, We Create A Free Website For You.  From your website you can easily upload your listings from the MLS by just typing in the MLS #.  An Automatic Quicktour is created for you and serves as a FREE virtual tour for your listings.  You can upload 6 pictures per listing!

• This will save you from paying a third party vendor for expensive virtual tours.

The unbranded links to these quicktours are IDX compliant, so you can use the unbranded links in the Virtual Tour field on MLS.

To get the branded or unbranded links for any listing, press the Web Links button next to the listing on your website.

Next street date will be September 4th.

The new Voice/Text Message System is generating lots of leads for the agents that have uploaded properties via the MLS.  If you have not done so but want to know more, just call me at the office…561-585-4722:)

Have a great weekend!

If you are a current advertiser and would like to submit an article, please send me an email at info@sfreguide.  Our only requirements are the real estate articles must be about what is happening here in Palm Beach County, also, it must be a Positive article.  All negative articles go into the shredder:)

For our Events/Going Green page I try and find unusual places to take off for the day or weekend, here in Florida.  If you have a great spot or event you’d like to share, send it along to the email address above. Our next issue will be on the streets September 4th….so make sure any events don’t start until several days later.

Also, we have the best graphic artist in town!  Besides working with us, she freelances and does a great job on all types of print work.  Branding, Postcards, Business Cards, Media Kits..you don’t need to go thru us, you can contact her directly.  She is creative, fast & reasonable.

Ina Goncarova

• igoncarova@yahoo.com
• 603-305-1503/She is local
• www.ontheflystudio.com

Have a great day!

Just a quick note to let you know the newest issue, Volume 5 Issue 13 have now been delivered to all of the Publix locations and street distribution has begun.

Below is a new article from our Business Coach, Nancy Proffitt.  If you would like a pdf file to print out and perhaps use in your weekly meetings, send me an email at info@sfreguide.com.

Have a great weekend!

What would your life be like if you were able to focus your attention on three priorities for a week?

What if you were able to concentrate and focus on those activities, in spite of distractions?

Few people understand what concentration means, or how important a role it plays in our lives. Life consists of what we pay attention to. If we focus on meaningful, positive things, we’ll have a meaningful, positive life. If we focus on meaningless, negative things, we’ll have a meaningless, negative life. This is simplistic and also enduringly profound: one of life’s great truths.“Our experience is what we attend to.” —William James

If we chronically multi-task and engage in scatteredthoughts, we will have scattered, chaotic lives. Evenif we aren’t one of those who have ADD (Attention-Deficit Disorder), the fast paced world we live in is very distracting. We are constantly bombarded by information,e-mail, phone calls and news. The ability to focus and to concentrate on one thing at a time is a necessary strength we all need to develop.

Concentration helps us focus on and in the moment, instead of frantically rushing from moment to moment.The Pareto Principle says that 80 percent of our results comes from only 20 percent of our efforts. That means that only about 20 percent of our activities actually provide the results we are looking for.

Five Keys to Concentration
In today’s distracting environments, it is not easy to stay focused. Here are five essential keys to concentration and focus, taken from Sam Horn’s book ConZentrate: Get Focused and Pay Attention-When Life Is Filled With Pressures, Distractions,and Multiple Priorities (St. Martin’s Press 2000)

1. Concentration is the ability to be single-minded. Focusing on one task at a time is difficult because we all have so many things to do. It means we have to temporarily ignore some things in favor of others. Deferring other projects doesn’t mean they’re not important, only less so for the moment. It requires making choices as to priorities and scheduling.

2. Concentration is interest in action. Can you think of a time when you were so engrossed in an activity that you became one with it? All sense of timedisappeared. All outside activities were unnoticed.Athletes call this the zone. Others, a state of flow.

3. Concentration is mental obedience. It means harnessing our thoughts, focusing on what is needed, and saying “no” to outside distractions. At times, the mind can be unruly, like a rebellious teenager. We must develop the ability to say to our mind “no, not right now,” and carry on. Realize that your mind probably prefers play to work. However, you would not give candy to your child each time he or she asked. You might try using the Premack Principle, which involves doing something pleasurable after a task is completed.

4. Concentration is staying power. The ability to persist in spite of distraction, opposition, discouragement and counter influences is the key to attaining what we want in life. That means coming back after getting distracted. It also means completing an activity even though it may not be perfect. It includes the ability to keep on in spite of making mistakes. It is keeping on keeping on,persisting, correcting, continuing and coming back.

5. Concentration is mindfully managing our TIME
T = Thoughts
I = Interests
M = Moments
E = Emotions

Time, when we think back over our life, is not really remembered in days, months, years, but rather in moments. Specifically those moments in which our thoughts, interests, and emotions were fully engaged in a person, place or process. If we reframe our concept of time, we can remove our compulsion to race through life. Instead of thinking there’s never enough time, we realize we have all the time we’re going to get…right now. We come to understand the best way to make the most of our time is to make the most of this moment.

The Power of Priority. Try the Power of Three for one week.

Identify three important activities (making phone calls with clients, spending time with your children, clearing off your desk) that would bring you some quality results in your life. This is more difficult than it appears, because everyone has more than three things that
need prioritizing. But only choose three. Then spend 80 percent of your efforts attending to these three priorities for one week.

Yes, this means saying “no” to other people and activities. However, at the end of the week, you will be amazed at the results. You will discover that you can do much more than you thought, if you focus and concentrate. For one thing, since this exercise is only
for one week, you can give yourself permission to say “no” to distractions. You discover that not only is it easier than you imagined, but how much more you are capable of doing. The following week, you can revise your plan, pick three other priorities or expand on the
same ones and refocus.

Nancy Proffitt, MBA, Certified Business Coach is the president of Proffitt Management Solutions and Proffitt Management Leadership Institute, an internationally recognized Leadership coaching firm dedicated to unleashing the full potential of individuals and
organizations.
She may be reached at 561-682-6060 or
email:Nancy@proffittmanagement.com .
Visit her website at www.proffittmanagement.co

Next street date is August 7th.

We are getting lots of positive feedback from agents using our new Voice/Text messaging system. 

Once someone calls the 800# and then the ID#, agents are getting a lead generated to them instantly and are able to return calls right away.  For more information call 954-415-6326.