Sound decision making is integral for a successful real estate business, how do you ensure that you’re always making good decisions?

Real estate is a uniquely decision-based profession. Sure, all businesses depend upon good decision making to succeed, but the sheer quantity of fields that real estate encompasses – from marketing, to negotiating, to advertising, to financing – gives particular credence to the decision-making process for agents.

Given all those aforementioned aspects of the business, however, and all the details that agents must keep in mind, it can be alarmingly easy to slip-up a bit in your decision making.

Here are three ways that can happen, and how to avoid them:

1. The Preponderance of Choice – We’re confronted with hundreds of choices ever day, from what outfit to wear to what to eat for breakfast – and those details are not even directly related to your business! Therefore, it’s important to not let the overwhelming nature of choice overwhelm you. If you overanalyze your available choices, and become hung-up on the small things, it becomes very likely that your concentration will wane in other, more important areas.

So when it comes to choices, you should prioritize, and make sure you’re deliberating on issues worth deliberating on.

2. Business ADD – As we’ve written before, there’s a certain romanticism to working overtime and doing everything yourself…until your system can’t handle it anymore and you crash. Marla Tabaka put it best in a recent article on Inc – “The brain is optimized to focus on one task at a time. Spreading our attention across multiple tasks becomes draining and leaves little energy for those tasks that matter most.”

Simply, focus on the task directly in front of you. That focus will not only lead to better work, but more sound decision making, as well.

3. Submitting to the Noise – Focusing on the tasks in front of you, though, can be mighty hard, what with phone calls, emails, text messages, Instagram feeds, Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, Pinterest boards, Vine videos, YouTube channels…the potential for distraction nowadays is demoralizing.

It’s essential, amongst all that collective noise, that you retain your focus; good decision making is impossible without it. For some great tips on focus, see our earlier article on the topic.