How Top Agents Control Their Time in a Shifting Market

Busy is not the same as productive. Any agent can finish a day with every minute accounted for and still have nothing new in the pipeline to show for it.

In the first episode of The One Key Thing, I sat down with one of my closest friends, Nicole Burnett, who has spent 13 years in real estate as a solo agent, a partner, a team owner, and the owner-operator of a local brokerage franchise based in Gig Harbor, Washington. I asked her for the single piece of advice that would move the needle most for agents right now. Her answer was time.

Control what you can control. Nicole’s reasoning is disarmingly simple. No agent can control the 10-year bond yield, inflation, or mortgage rates, and in a shifting market that reality can breed a genuine sense of powerlessness. What every agent can control is how they spend their hours.

For Nicole, that begins with small, protected commitments, like showing up at the gym each morning or switching a phone to grayscale to blunt the pull of social media. It extends to guarding the work that pays: lead generation, open houses, conversations with your sphere and past clients, and getting belly to belly with as many people as possible. Your business should serve your life, not the other way around, and because she prioritizes the one task that truly matters each day, she has room for whatever life brings alongside it.

Rank your tasks by dollar signs. I’ll be candid here. I am not wired for time management. I once failed a time management class in college, and a personality assessment later scored me a three in that category. What finally worked was a priority sheet. Each night, I brain-dump the next day’s to-do list into my phone.

Each morning, before my feet hit the floor, I mark every item with one to five dollar signs based on how directly it moves my business forward. I start with the five-dollar-sign tasks and work my way down; anything without a dollar sign waits because it’s busy work, not productive work. My team agents and even my admin follow the same system. As the saying goes, I’ll take a consistent agent over a skilled agent any day of the week.

Systems matter more than mastery. We also talked about the busy work that still has to get done. Nicole pointed first to people, then to technology, from the auto plans inBrivity, the CRM we both use, to AI tools that can lift entire tasks off your plate. She reminded me that you can be shockingly mediocre at time management and still see the benefits, as long as you stay consistent.

I’m a squirrel by nature, yet a friend’s line about systems and processes making the ordinary extraordinary hangs framed in my office. Documenting how everything gets done, from answering the phone to congratulating a client on going under contract, is what keeps a business steady. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

Surf the market together. Nicole also offered an analogy I can’t stop thinking about: guiding clients through this market is like teaching them to surf. You can’t predict every wave, whether it’s a sudden rate jump or a shift in buyer demand, but you can invite them onto your board and promise to bring them in safely with your best expertise.

She firmly believes opportunities exist in every market, and that agents who build their skills now will thrive when activity picks back up. Her parting advice was to get in rooms with people doing what you want to do, because the colleagues who truly understand this business help you solve problems before they get the better of you.

Jump to the part of our conversation that speaks to where you are right now:

00:00 — Meet Nicole Burnett

02:29 — Control Your Time

07:54 — Dollar-Sign Priorities

15:40 — Surfing the Market

If you’re an agent or team leader who wants a schedule and systems that hold up in any market, I’d love to help. Call me at 406-540-8211, email shonna@shonnakey.com, or visit shonnakey.com.

And if you know an agent who’s busy but not moving forward, send this episode their way.