- Lisa Lippman has worked in the real estate industry for 22 years and has sold over $1 billion worth of real estate over the past four years.
- She represents multimillion-dollar clients across Manhattan.
- Lippman told Business Insider she has three crucial tricks that help her stay organized on the job.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Manhattan real-estate broker Lisa Lippman has sold over $1 billion of real estate in the past four years.
Lippman is a broker at the luxury real-estate firm Brown Harris Stevens, where she was the No. 1 broker in 2016 and 2017. The Wall Street Journal named her the No. 4 broker in Manhattan in 2016. She recently told Business Insider that she works 16 hours a day representing multimillion-dollar clients across Manhattan - and revealed three crucial tricks that help her stay organized.
Here are her tips:
1. Flag unread emails
Lippman told Business Insider that she stays on top of her emails by checking them every hour. She believes every email should be answered in a three-hour window.
"Part of becoming a good multitasker is looking at emails and if you don't have a lot of time, figuring out which ones have to be responded to right away and which ones can wait two to three hours," said Lippman.
She suggests flagging important emails that you can't answer right away so that they don't get lost in your inbox.
2. Avoid social media
While Lippman has both personal and business social media accounts, she told Business Insider she doesn't check them during the day. She often finds that people who use social media get distracted from their work.
"Being on social media while you're working ends up being a huge time waster," Lippman said. "It makes your brain wander from the task at hand."
3. When setting up phone calls, never say "call me"
Lippman sets aside time to speak with her clients because it makes them feel important. But she has a specific way of going about it: Anytime someone asks for a call, she gets their availability and sets up an appointment on her calendar.
"Rather than just telling someone to call you, you should set up a time to speak. In my business, we are in and out of appointments all the time, we're not sitting at a desk," Lippman said. "I find that if I don't [set up a time], I'm playing phone tag with somebody and that's not enjoyable, it doesn't make them feel important."
Read more: Procrastination isn't a time management problem. It's an emotional problem
Lippman's time-management advice echoes that of many business leaders and experts. Business Insider's Shana Lebowitz reported that leadership and business consultant Greg McKeown says that when you're estimating how long it will take to complete something, multiply it by three. Most of the things on your to-do list will take longer to finish than originally expected.
Other practices such as creating a calendar system, making lists, and taking short breaks throughout the day are all things work experts say will make workdays more productive.