How many hours of work do you invest in per closed loan?

If you can't answer that question, you are not alone. Some loans take us very little time while others may take us cumulative days worth of work (and hopefully they close.)

We often think of ourselves in terms of how much we earn on an hourly basis because the calculation is so simple. We take what we produce for the month or the year and then divide it by how many hours we worked.

But where we tend to go wrong in that calculation is in the hours worked part.

Just because we showed up at 9:00 and left at 5:00 did we really work an eight hour day? Or did we socialize, read insignificant emails and surf the web while we were supposed to be making loans? In other words did we just squander eight hours at the officer or were they eight quality hours?

The temptation is easy and it exists in all of us. What is important is that you keep the distractions to a minimum and use your previous time wisely because that time you just spent on Yahoo! may have cost you a golden opportunity elsewhere!