7 Apps to Help You Stick to Your 2019 Realty Business Goals

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For many of us, the New Year ushers in fresh motivation to improve ourselves and our circumstances. We optimistically compile lists of things we’d like to accomplish personally and professionally, and January 1st seems like the perfect time to jumpstart these aspirations.

Mid-January has arrived. Maybe it’s getting harder to stick with your resolutions and the momentum you had going into the new year has slowed. Have you found it more difficult than you expected to stick with your goals? If so, you’re not alone. January 12th has been dubbed “Quitters Day,” after Strava, the social network for athletes, found it to be the day most people gave up on their New Year’s fitness resolutions. U.S. News says approximately 80% of all people give up their resolutions by mid-February.
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So how do you avoid becoming part of that statistic and achieve the goals you started the new year with? Here are 7 app recommendations to track your progress and make sure your resolutions survive well past mid-February:

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Be Specific

Vague goals create a grey area that’s easy to meander in until you’re completely lost. “Build my brand,” does not specify a measurable result or a timeframe the goal should be achieved within. This can lead to procrastination and eventual abandonment of a goal if you come to feel you can’t get good traction moving toward your destination—wherever that may be.
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Instead, rethink your goal into something definable: “rewrite my agent biography,” “print new business cards,” “engage with clients on social media three times a day,” etc. Deadlines are great motivators as well, so give yourself a definite cutoff date to complete your goals by and you’ll be surprised at how much more hustle you have pursuing them.
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App Recommendation: With GoalsOnTrack, you can create SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) and keep track of your progress every day. It allows you to break down more ambitious undertakings into milestones and subgoals with reoccurring tasks. If you aren’t sure how to define your goal, you can use one of the app’s templates with built-in plans as a springboard.
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You can also journal your goals and create vision boards to visualize your success to keep yourself inspired.

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Track Your Progress
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Maybe you have a great vision of how you’d like to grow your realty business but have become unmotivated because you struggle to see any improvement or change.
Keeping track of your progress is a great way to stay encouraged and organized when taking on a task, whether small or complex.
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App Recommendation: When it comes to tracking your progress, Strides is a great option with lots of features. It has four tracker types (habit, target, average, and project), and charts that show your progress, including line charts, streaks, and success rates. You’ll also be congratulated every time you reach a benchmark or achieve a goal so you can be reminded of your achievements.

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Introduce Stakes
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Can’t stick to your goals, even when you’re tracking progress and have a great game plan to follow? Perhaps you need to get some skin in the game and utilize the psychology of loss aversion and accountability.

App Recommendations: StickK and Beeminder allow users to wager money on the success or failure of their goals. That’s right—your own money is on the line if you go off track. StickK allows you to invite friends or family members as “referees” to monitor your progress, while both apps have active forums to keep you accountable, so you’ll have even more incentive to stick with your pledges.

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Include Others in Your Goals

Many people find it is easier to stick with their goals if they have a support group to share in their successes and setbacks. Maybe you find it hard to do things by your lonesome or have a difficult time seeing your goals through if they cut into your social life. If so, there are great apps available that provide the social aspects you crave, with the bonus of tracking features and schedule reminders to stay the course.

App Recommendation: HabitShare lets you add friends for accountability and motivation and transforms your goals into a social experience. Keep track of your progress with streaks, charts, daily and weekly habit goals, as well as messaging and daily comments.

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Organize Your Time

Are you fighting the clock when it comes to pursuing goals? Maybe you struggle to create goals that can be completed within a realistic timeframe, or you can’t seem to find the spare time to devote to growing your brand or developing your skills. Time blocking can be a powerful tool to reclaim your minutes and hours and redirect them toward ambitions you’d like to achieve.

App Recommendation: If you need help staying on track and figuring out where your time is going, ATracker allows you to time tasks and creates charts to help you analyze your daily routine. Once you’ve figured out where your time goes, create tasks and alarms to help you prioritize and carve out designated periods to work toward your goals.

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If at First You Don’t Succeed

Even the best laid plans aren’t immune to setbacks, and everyone slips up now and again. Life happens. If Quitters Day happened to be the day you lost motivation or you feel your progress slowing, don’t give up entirely!
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There’s a proverb that says, “Do not look where you fell, but where you slipped.” Oftentimes success means learning from mistakes and setbacks, dusting ourselves off, and continuing toward our goals with a renewed perspective.

App Recommendation: Good Habits allows you to create habit chains with checklists, reminders and deadlines to keep you on task. If you happen to break a habit chain, you can record the reasons why to learn from your hiccup and make different choices next time. 

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Summary

Accomplishing New Year’s resolutions can be made more social, rewarding, and attainable with the right technology tools.
If developing your skills or acquiring knowledge as an agent is one of your goals this year, check out our training calendar and be sure to add one of our technology classes to your newly downloaded apps.

We also offer services and products to help you build your brand and market yourself, like custom domain mapping, social media image ads, and custom email signatures, so why not make one of these an incentive for reaching a milestone or keeping your goals alive past mid-February?