Trying to calculate the exact number of hours a successful real estate agent puts in every day and every week is tricky. Daily schedules vary from agent to agent and from day to day; what one professional does first thing on a Monday might be another’s Thursday afternoon afterthought.

Furthermore, what agents focus on during their work week differs as well. Some are truly people-focused, others are more administrative, and others don’t have a plan at all and simply roll with what the business requires in real time.

This lack of a concrete answer can be frustrating for agents looking to take the next step toward more success without piling on more hours. You want a life outside of your career, and no agent wants to be burned out by the boring parts of the job.

So what does a successful real estate agent’s daily schedule look like? Busy, for sure, but the key is working smarter and not necessarily longer—and there are ways to achieve that.

The Daily Agenda

The daily schedule of a successful real estate agent is anything but slow. On any given day—and often, every day of the week—an agent may be busy with the following tasks, responsibilities, and business strategies:

• Reaching out to new leads and potential clients and cultivating existing relationships

• Posting and engaging on social media

• Researching current listings and the business

• Keeping websites updated with listing photos, news and events, and more

• Preparing new listings

• Researching listings for houses to show buyers

• Researching listings to increase knowledge of market conditions, to see what properties aren’t selling, to find FSBOs that might be ripe for an agent, and more

• Tracking expenses and plan budgets

• Performing simple maintenance and upkeep of listings of unoccupied properties

• Preparing for open houses

• Handling a wide array of paperwork, from listing documents to transaction documents to contracts to offer and purchase agreements

• Networking and negotiating with other real estate agents

• Training and staying current with industry trends

Obviously, this is quite a daily schedule—and it doesn’t even include the weekend responsibilities of successful real estate agents, such as open houses, taking buyers to other agents’ listings, and hosting or participating in community events.

Some of the activities on this list are unavoidable; for example, if you complete a sale on a listing, there will be paperwork. Some are optional but vital—your word-of-mouth reputation better be outstanding if you plan to barely market yourself. And some, such as social media and researching the MLS, are just smart best practices. The challenge, of course, is not only finding time for everything, but also doing everything well.

A Partner in Time

Communicating with clients, introducing yourself to people and forming relationships, being the face of your business and your team, closing deals—these tasks are the bread and butter that real estate agents must do well to grow their operations. The administrative, bookkeeping, marketing, and technical responsibilities are essential, too. Technology offers a way to make the busy day, filled with both sides of the job, seem not so busy.

The smartphone is so standard to real estate today that new agents might wonder how previous generations operated without it. Taking full advantage of mobile applications, messaging, and (especially) calendars keeps agents better organized when all the daily tasks and appointments start piling up. Cloud applications are also useful; for example, file-sharing services such as Google Drive or Dropbox give you access to documents, photos, and videos from almost any device. Tablets combine mobile ease of use with portable hardware that can be used for in-person interaction with clients and prospects.

Beyond basic technology, real-estate specific applications, especially those offered by top brokerages such as HomeSmart, offer a tremendous boost for successful agents. For example:

• Easy-to-use website tools make posting pictures and making updates a cinch and provide templates so that pages can be efficiently added.

• Transaction management software streamlines processes and frees agents up from time-consuming busywork.

• Admin resources keep agents’ businesses organized and humming along.

Moreover, great brokerages offer training for their technology so that you and anyone else who supports you can learn to use the tools as easily as you can. The end result is not only a better-run business, but also more time in your daily schedule to attend to the strategies that truly drive agent success: communicating with people and helping them realize their home ownership dreams.