Time Management Tips from Beth Azor

“How do you manage your time?”

That is probably the question I am most asked during my bootcamps, workshops, and during individual coaching sessions. My guess is, that since I’m constantly giving a lot of ideas on how to improve skills and habits, people think, “Maybe she knows how to get more done in a day.”?

I’m not an expert in time management by any means but I can provide some tips that have worked for me, and other ideas I have picked up along the way:

Getting Up Early

As of today, I am at day 29 of a 30-day personal challenge. Hal Elrod, author of the book The Miracle Morning, recommends getting up an hour earlier than you normally do every morning and complete six things that will contribute to your personal development and future success. In his book, he recommends we do six things every morning: (1) meditation, (2) affirmation, (3) visualization, (4) exercise, (5) reading positive material, and (6) journaling.

Since I haven’t seen any obvious impactful results yet, I’ve decided I’m going to do it until the end of the year. I want to make sure I give it my all. I don’t want to be like the people who say, “Oh, canvassing doesn’t work,” after doing it only once, so I’m going to double down and look forward to seeing the benefits.
Gary Vaynerchuk said he’s been waking up 30 minutes earlier than normal in the last few months and can’t believe how much more he’s getting done.

When you get an extra 30 minutes to an hour in the day, you want to do something with that time you think would be beneficial to you. I’m not sure the visualization or the affirmations are working for me just yet, so I may substitute it with planning my day or more writing. You can also educate yourself by listening to a podcast or reading a book.

Time Blocking

What is “time blocking”?

If there is a specific time-consuming task I need to get done, I will allot time to it and plow through. For example, if I need to work on Pipedrive (my CRM- which is something you should all have because certainly, that helps with time management!) I will “block time” to input notes. I will set an alarm on my phone for 20 minutes and then you can guess what happens when the 20 minutes is up… Yep! I’m so engaged in the task that I’ll do it for another 30 minutes, which is fabulous. It’s a little mind trick that works for me.

VERY IMPORTANT: While doing tasks, don’t answer phone calls. I put my phone on airplane mode to keep it from ringing while I’m working on something that requires my attention like an LOI or a lease. If you have an office door, close it. Get rid of the distractions. The time you allocate to a task is for that task only.

Top 3

Another trick that works for me is scheduling my top 3. My goal is to get 3 important things done every day. So, the night before, just before I go to sleep, I will put the 3 important things I want to get done the next day on my calendar

9 times out of 10, those things are follow-up phone calls. If they’re on my calendar for 7:30 or 8:00am, I can usually get them done after I drop Mario off at the bus stop. So, by the time I get to the office, either they’re all done, or I’m 2 out of 3. Not bad!

Find More Time

I highly recommend you do this exercise that I lovingly call the “Exercise of Torture” once a year, where you time log all your activities.

Complete a time log of every activity every 15 minutes for one week, starting at 7:00 AM or 8:00 AM on Monday morning until Friday night at 6:00 PM. I’m sure you will see things you shouldn’t be doing, and you should be able to free up an extra 2 to 3 hours in your schedule. If not, send it to me and we can walk through it together and I promise we will find extra time!

Virtual Assistants

We’re presently looking for a Virtual Assistant to log information into Pipedrive for us. When we go to workshops and we collect business cards or postcards from people who want free giveaways, neither Josee nor myself should be doing data entry into Pipedrive. We would rather pay a VA $10.00 per hour to do this. Our hourly rate is too high for that activity.

Are there any tasks that you are doing that you could pay someone a lower hourly rate to do for you?

If you’re washing your car on the weekends and you don’t like it, can you hire someone? Are you still cleaning your house? If your hourly rate is $100 an hour and you can hire a cleaning person for $20 an hour, shouldn’t you be doing that?

If you want to spend more time with your kids, but you’re busy running to the grocery store every other day, then you should be using Shipt or Instacart. I’ve been using Shipt for two years and it literally has saved me 3 hours a week, not to mention the money it saves me from the lack of impulse buying! 😊

So, wake up earlier, list your top 3, do the Exercise of Torture, time block, shut off distractions and leverage your time with other people. Those are my tips for time management. I’d love for you to share your time management tips with me!

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Learn More:

Canvassing and Rejection

Maximizing Renewals

How to Break Out of “The Funk”

When Do You Have Leverage in a Deal?

Do Something That Scares You

Prepare Before You Prospect

I believe if you had to close 10 deals in 10 days, you’d be better off spending 9 of those days sharpening your strategy. That means knowing your own space, your competitors’ spaces, whether new entrants are raising or lowering rents, and whether your prospects’ businesses are growing or fading. It means knowing what’s shifting in your local demographics and whether new roadwork or new employers are about to change your market. You can get away without doing this once. I did, with Sir Speedy, back on my very first day. But when you don’t know why something worked, you can’t repeat it. Luck runs out fast. Market intelligence is what lets you replicate success instead of hoping for it. You don’t need weeks to gather this. Get out and walk your competitors’ centers in person. Grab coffee with neighboring leasing agents and trade real intel, social media only tells you so much. And if you get a prospect you can’t help, send them to a competitor. It builds goodwill, and higher occupancy in your market raises rents for everyone, including you. I got a piece of advice years ago from a national retailer with over 150 locations. Show up

August 17, 2026

The Prospecting Tools You’re Probably Ignoring

Canvassing is my bread and butter, but it’s not the only strategy that works. Here are a few others I use, and how I use them right. For mom and pop retailers, direct message them on Facebook. I’ve been getting a 32% response rate doing this over the past eighteen months. And if you just got off the phone with a prospect, text them immediately after. That single habit has driven a 40% increase in setting showing appointments. Most mom and pops still don’t have a professional email address, but every single one of them has a cell phone. Use it. For national and regional retailers, LinkedIn works better than email. Their inboxes are flooded, but LinkedIn is still less crowded and most of them have notifications turned on. If you want to cold call a national, do it only after you’ve sent them detailed information about your center, their locations in your market, and their competitors’ locations, and confirmed they actually received it. A few more sources people overlook completely. Skim the Yelp reviews when you’re sourcing restaurants and steer clear of anything under 3 stars. Read the advertisements in your local print magazines and industry dailies. And don’t

August 10, 2026

Why Canvassing Beats Waiting for the Phone to Ring

I ask my rock stars three questions at the start of every class. How many vacant spaces do you have? How many call-ins do you get each week? How many of those are actually qualified? A qualified prospect, in my world, has more than one location and money on hand to expand. When I tally it up, only about .05% of call-ins meet that bar. If you’re depending on leasing signs and cold emails to fill your spaces, you’re going to be waiting a long time. Canvassing is what actually works. Only 2% of agents do it regularly, and I’d bet that’s the same 2% closing the most deals. It’s no longer about who you know, it’s about who knows you. Face-to-face relationships are what get you remembered when a prospect is finally ready to expand. I canvass, and so does my entire team, 10 hours a week minimum. I average 15 new business cards for every 15 stores I visit, even after 31 years in my market. I still find prospects I’d been overlooking for years. Case in point, there was a tennis shop on my route to my son’s school that I’d passed for two years without stopping

August 3, 2026

Stop Asking “Is the Owner Here?”

When I canvass with agents, almost every single one walks into a store and asks the person at the register, “Is the owner here?” It feels natural, but it’s actually the worst question you can ask. Think about who’s on the other side of that question. If they are the owner, you just told them they don’t look like it. If they’re not, you just told them they’re not important enough to talk to. Either way, you’ve disrespected the person standing in front of you before you’ve said anything useful. Skip the gatekeeper question entirely. Walk in, greet whoever you meet, and get straight to your purpose. “Hey, I have a shopping center a few miles away. What are your expansion plans?” That one line respects their time, treats them like they matter, and opens a real conversation, whether they’re the owner, the manager, or the person working the register today who might own the place tomorrow. Rockstar Tip: Cut “Is the owner here?” from your canvassing script completely. Lead with your purpose instead, and you’ll walk out with a name and contact info far more often.

July 27, 2026

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