WEB REVIEW

Web Review: Motivation & Personal Growth
Exercise Your Mind

A site shows you how to better manage your time, reduce stress, and improve your productivity to attain greater success in your life and career.

REVIEWED BY CHRISTOPHER M. LEPORINI

Web Site: Mind Tools
URL: www.mindtools.com

What the Site Offers

In the real estate game, the sale usually goes to the mentally agile. Mind Tools provides a virtual gym of resources to help you improve a variety of thinking skills in your life and career.

Mind Tools is categorized into nine categories: time management, stress management, memory improvement, information assimilation, practical creativity, managing complexity, decision making, project planning and management, and job-hunting skills. Each section provides examples and exercises to expand your understanding and a list of resources and books for additional learning.

Be forewarned, though. Mind Tools does have its drawbacks. Much of the content is buried and requires you to click through multiple levels to access. Some sections contain very little information, and printer versions are not provided. In fact, for most of the sections, the site encourages you to download a PDF version for a fee ($4.99 for individual sections for $19.99 for all nine sections).

The site is produced by Mind Tools Ltd., a company based in the United Kingdom. Although you’ll occasionally see traditional English spelling of words such as “favourite,” the site otherwise is not distractingly written for a U.S. audience. In fact, almost a third—the largest segment—of its site visitors are from the United States.

Valuable Site Features for Real Estate Professionals

• Time Management Skills. If you find yourself working harder, yet constantly falling further behind, this section might provide some help. It suggests that you start by keeping an activity log to determine how you really use your time. You might find that non-revenue-generating tasks are gobbling up a significant amount of your day; you can use this information to adjust your schedule to produce the most effective results. The section contains instructions on setting long-term goals and organizing daily tasks using prioritized to-do lists that rank tasks on a scale from very important to unimportant.
  
  
• Stress Management Techniques. If the day-to-day grind of real estate sales has you exhausted, this section can help you identify stressors that may be bringing you down. It helps you determine the causes of stress in your life and then provides a range of stress management techniques to keep stress from getting the best of you. The section also provides a burnout self-test to determine if you’re at risk and how you can avoid burnout.
  
  
• Tools for Improving Your Memory. You can't let your memory slip if you want to stay competitive. You need to be able to recall everything from legal and ethical rules to details about home features. And forgetting your prospects' names at the listing presentation isn't going to inspire confidence in your abilities. This section of Mind Tools provides tricks for remembering names and other important information. It teaches you mnemonic devices—rhymes or formulas that assist memory (i.e., I before E, except after C)—to remember everything from simple lists to more complex information.
  
  
• Creativity Tools. This section provides tips to improve your technical creativity, which the site defines as the creation of new theories, technologies, or ideas. The site doesn’t cover artistic creativity, which it defines as innate self-expression. You can use the different creative-thinking strategies to brainstorm different ways to approach work challenges or to come up with radical new ideas for marketing and advertising.
  
  
• Project Planning & Management Tools. Real estate requires strong project management skills in order to successfully complete each deal without wasting any resources. This section of Mind Tools covers the specific skills you need to manage successful projects, including scheduling simple tasks and breaking down larger projects into smaller chunks.

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Suggest a Site For Review
Every week, REALTOR® Magazine Online's Web review editor surfs the Internet to find sites useful to your business and off-hours lives. Have a favorite real estate Web site that you would like to see reviewed? Send your suggestions to mediatech@realtors.org. All decisions on which sites will be reviewed are completely at the discretion of REALTOR® Magazine Online's editorial staff. Please note: this column does not review individual practitioner or brokerage sites.

The columns focus on free sites, as well as sites that charge for goods and services but still offer a free component of practical, sustained value to real estate practitioners, such as a free newsletter or industry news.
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REALTOR® Magazine Online's "Web Review" summarizes the content of Web sites that may be of interest to members. NAR and REALTOR® Magazine Online are not responsible for, and nothing in the Web site profile shall constitute NAR's or REALTOR® Magazine Online's endorsement of, the web site, its content, products and services, or its provider. NAR and REALTOR® Magazine Online believe the information contained in this profile was correct and accurate as of the time it was prepared, but do not warrant or guarantee the accuracy or completeness of that information and are not responsible for changes in the Web site. Members should conduct their own independent review of the Web site prior to any use of Web site, its content, products, or services to determine their suitability for the member's intended purpose.

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