We’ve all heard the expression “time is money.” From this statement, we can conclude that if we had more time, we could make more money—wouldn’t that be nice?

Well, guess what. Right now, most agents have more time. We’re talking specifically about those of you who are currently working from home instead of driving to the office every day.

While it is true that working from home does have its challenges—we have to resist the temptation to turn on the TV or open the fridge every 15 minutes, and many of us have young children at home who constantly want our attention—it’s also possible to find some additional time for those important-but-not-urgent projects that have been on our to-do list for months if not years.

Let’s assume:

  • It normally takes you an hour to get ready in the morning
  • You have a 30-minute drive to and from work
  • You normally take an hour for lunch

If you’re working from home, you’re getting-ready time should be chopped in half. Unless you have a Zoom call to attend, it’s likely that no clients or coworkers will see you during the day, so, if you’re like most of us, you may be working in your pajamas. That’s 30 minutes you can save right there. Obviously, your commute is considerably shorter if you’re working from home—you just need to walk a few steps to your home office instead of hopping in the car and fighting traffic. So that’s an additional hour per day you can save. And instead of going out to lunch, you can probably just make a quick sandwich and get back to work, another 30 minutes saved. Altogether, that’s two hours a day, or 10 hours per week, that you can save by working from home.

Assuming you still get up and get ready at the normal time instead of sleeping in, and assuming you continue working until the time you would normally return home in the evenings, you’ll have an additional 40 hours per month that you can apply to important projects that could take your business to the next level.

In small, 30-minute segments, this time savings doesn’t seem like a big deal, so it’s easy to squander the time by hitting snooze on your alarm clock or calling it quits at the normal end of the workday (5 pm, for example) instead of the time you normally get home (5:30 pm). But, if you decide to use this time for something productive, those small segments of time can really add up and give you the opportunity to accomplish something big.