The most common attribute that you’ll find in successful insurance agents is determination to stay ahead. They put their best foot forward in everything they do, whether it is in searching for new clients or sorting out customer issues. Unfortunately, sometimes most of these agents’ work is so engaging that they end up with calendars filled with client meetings and insurance tasks. They hardly get any time away from work for themselves and their families.
However, this shouldn’t be the case. Everyone needs to strike a balance between work, life and family.
Are you one of these agents that needs to create time for life away from work? Do you need to spend more time with your parents, wife and kids? Do you want to create time for your hobbies or to go on a vacation? Here are five tips to help you achieve this:
1. Set personal limits
Clients can be demanding. So it’s important to set your personal limits and be clear about them. This will ensure that you only make commitments which won’t affect your personal life. You can achieve this by:
- Respecting your own time, by creating a work routine and using a schedule or a task manager or a calendar.
- Communicating effectively, and setting client expectations early and consistently, for example, by having an email signature or a social media status that clearly states your work hours. An automated Facebook/WhatsApp response can also let clients know what time you’ll get back to them.
- Limiting how many meetings you can have in a day. This goes back to scheduling, task management, and calendaring. Agencify is an insurance management platform that can help you achieve this through its task manager.
2. Determine What’s an Emergency and What’s not an Emergency
You need to determine what an emergency is and what can wait. Sometimes we make situations seem like emergencies when they really aren’t. As a result, we end up spending a lot of time on these situations and forgetting our priorities. Once you determine that something isn’t an emergency, you can schedule it for later.
For example, a client calling you to request you to send their policy statement is not as urgent as a client calling you when they’ve been involved in a car accident. A policy statement can be sent later, while in the case of a car accident, you’ll need to walk with the client and collect all the information needed by the insurance company for claim processing.
3. Avoid Multitasking
Handling multiple tasks at the same time may seem like a good idea and may make you feel like you’re doing a lot but it’s not a good idea. As David Meyer, a world renowned psychologist, says, multitasking can cost as much as 40 percent of someone’s productive time, and tackling one task at a time can help save up to 16 hours each week. Therefore, let the thought of having more free time to yourself or with your family be your motivation to avoid multitasking so you can finish your work on time.
4. Technology
Let technology work for you. With technology, you’ll be able to cut down the amount of time spent doing tasks manually so you can create time for your life outside work. Agencify, the insurance management platform will help you to:
- Stay on top of your client’s requirements on the go, by giving you access to their policies at the click of a button. This is time saved because you won’t need to go through drawers full of folders to look for a specific client’s file.
- Make price comparisons across multiple insurers on one platform. This saves you the time spent making comparisons across different platforms. The time saved can be spent on yourself and with your family.
- Track your appointments, tasks and touch base with your clients through its task manager. This will ensure that you do and finish all your important tasks on time so you can spend more time on yourself and with your family.
5. Set financial goals
When you have saved little to no money at all, you may feel pressured to spend more time working. Unfortunately, this usually means having to give up personal and family time in the process. Setting financial goals can help you to take control of your finances and your time. The goals you set need to reflect what you need to earn every month and what you need to spend and save. This will ensure that you always have enough money to spend and save so you can worry less about your finances and focus more on enjoying family time and doing the things you love. The Agencify app allows you to track your commissions to know your financial position.
Committing to Work-Life Balance
As Heather Schuck says, “you will never feel truly satisfied by work until you are satisfied by life.” And though you can’t completely get rid of imbalances between work and life, you can commit to finding your life balance so you can create time to enjoy the benefits of your hard work. Set personal limits and financial goals, understand what counts as emergencies and what doesn’t, avoid multitasking, and leverage technology. You’ll get there.
For more information on how you can leverage on what Agencify offers to help you strike a balance between work and life, email us at dennis.njenga@agencify.insure
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