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I Meet You in the Clouds - 5 Apps for Remote Work

The days of the cigar smoking real estate broker sitting in the rich looking teak office awaiting clients to show up for a presentation are pretty much over. All you need today is a good cellphone, a hot spot and the necessary apps to connect where-ever you are. Mobility is a must for the real estate consultant of today just like flexibility.
I live in Gilroy and specialize in equestrian properties and rural areas like the South County of Silicon Valley, an area about 20 miles away from my brokerage in Campbell. Most of my buyers I meet at Panera or any other free wireless coffee shop conveniently located for my clients.
Only by walking through a home, I can include the "Unzillowables," the special features into my pricing strategy and home evaluation for a seller, so I meet them at their homes and bring my mobile office with me.
As a Military Relocation Professional, I very often get contacted by active military personnel who is only able to visit prospective homes virtually and only see their new home in person for the first time during the final walk-through.
Contract forms can be accessed online and emailed for docu-sign to my clients at home sitting in their bunny slippers in front of the TV.  Why going through the traffic to meet in an office? All this is possible through apps. Below are 5 important and helpful  apps for remote work and if this is not enough, here are 27 more.

 5 Apps for Remote Work

Whether you're out on the road, working in a home office, or collaborating remotely with business partners or vendors, you're going to need apps. The web-based solutions listed below will help make collaborating and communicating easy, efficient and enjoyable. Here are five top picks:

Slack helps you exchange cumbersome email threads for real time, team-based communications. Slack saves every remark in a conversation thread (including attachments like documents or other media) for later reference.

Trello is a project management solution based on a system of cards and project boards, similar to a real-life corkboard with index cards. Each card allows you to attach links or documents and contains individual message threads to keep things tidy.

Meldium manages passwords for teams, giving system or document access to team members without direct sharing of any passwords, closing a huge security gap when dealing with sensitive information.

Docady converts any camera-equipped device into a document scanner, then organizes those scans into a searchable database that's encrypted to military-grade standards, keeping all your important files in a secure digital space.

Box is a file sharing and collaboration tool that supports many file types, including Office Online for editing Word, Excel and PowerPoint files simultaneously with remote team members.

Learn - Earn - Play - Every Day

One month into the 90 Day Pace Challenge, we learned today to not follow the conventional model to spend the first part of your life learning, the second part earning and the third part, after your retirement, playing. Instead, schedule time to learn, earn, and play every day to have a happy life. Don't become a workaholic without any fun in life, don't become a player who never learns anything additional one out of school. Great lesson today! And now that I have learned something, I go and earn and later in the evening, hell yeah, I will play watching my granddaughter in her violin concert!

90-Day Pace Challenge - Day 9 - My New Middle Name is Happy Camper!

Indeed I am a happy camper because I pulled through a very work-intensive and stressful week without abandoning my 90-Day-Pace commitments. Thank you to my friend and personal trainer CJ in my college gym for the moral support at 6:30 AM to get my work-out done.

It's census day today at the college and things calm down a little bit after the first two weeks with students settling into the winter quarter.

Real Estate business is really picking up here in Silly Icon Valley and just when I thought I can't take on one more thing, I received a message from my mentor in the early AM that he needs me to have a cma ready by 8AM.

I cancelled my early-bird gym time in the college to get the cma done - no pressure - and power walked instead during lunch. This way I kept all my commitments and then some.

So why you may ask do I start this post with calling myself a happy camper?

Well, my cma was right on with the appraisal and yesterday, Steve, my new market center leader announced that my very missed dual career evening classes are back on the schedule.

It felt like a mini family reunion when all my dual career pals rolled into the classroom and we had a great coaching session with pizza served. We felt heard and part of the KW family - happy campers. Many of our top producing agents come from the dual career group. There is so much potential and I wish everyone including myself a top notch 2016. Watch out world, the Keller Williams Silicon Valley dual career team is on a mission!

I wish everybody a great weekend and  Martin Luther King Day! Live your dreams and dream big!

90 Day Pace Challenge - Faith, Personal Relationships, and some Gym Philosophy

Day 5 of the 90 Day Pace Challenge called for a faith related committment. Uh oh, now I am in big doodoo was my first thought because I am not a member of a specific religion. Sigh of relief, it is not necessary. What keynote speaker Keith asks for is a commitment to read an inspirational book once a week or listen to one of your inspirational role models and similar. I can do that. I pledge to listen to the daily Momentorship messages, read inspirational books anyway and all the time and one of my role model is Jesus Christ so it cannot hurt to look into the bible once a week as well.

Day 6 asked for a commitment in the field of personal relationships. Well, I can't commit to never yell at my  husband as he suggested because then I never get any house chores done anymore (just kidding). I pledged to read EXTRA on the weekend one book with my 8-year-old granddaughter Adriana. I listen to her reading during the week for her homework assignments. Adriana suggested that on the weekend I should read to her from a German book so that she hears how it sounds and be able to learn German better. Fine with me and good suggestion!

It's day 7 today and now that I have all five cornerstones mapped out for the 90 day challenge, I can write about how I am doing with the follow up. It is hard to hit the gym at 6AM but only until I am on the treadmill. Then time just flies. I notice that I get my most creative business ideas when running on the treadmill in the morning and lifting weights. Once I am done and out of the shower, I put these ideas on paper while having my morning coffee. Later in the day, I work on them. My brain power exercises in the gym just like my muscles. I feel more whole.

90 Day Pace Challenge - Day 4 - 10 Dollar Per Week

Today I put 10 Dollars in my new 90-Day-Challenge piggy bank - finance is a cornerstone of my life.  I pledged to do that every week. Next year I will donate the money to a local charity I support from all my real estate transactions, DreamPower Horsemanship. It's not about saving huge amounts, it's about learning to put aside continuously.

90 Day Pace Challenge - Day 3 - The Return of the Santa

"Foundation" is also one of the five cornerstones of my life I have to work on during the 90 day pace challenge.

I am required to change one habit, do one basic approach in my life differently to achieve a firmer foundation . Well, I decided to switch from happy go lucky plan everything in my head to daily revise and add my chores and events on a google calendar for 36 months. I entered everything from taking down the Christmas decoration to going to see my grandson in Germany in March and Keller Williams Mega Camp.

For today, I had penciled in lead generation/door knocking in the morning hrs. Following another momentorship recommendation, I scheduled this doorknocking on this rainy Saturday morning after a good nights rest and not as usual in the afternoon on a work day.

What can I say? I got out to the neighbor-town at 10AM. I executed my idea to  I drop off thank you gifts to the neighbors of my last open house. The open house was very busy and all the parking in this sought after community was occupied by our visitors. The neighbors took it very patiently.

I hit the entire neighborhood and most of them told me that I was the first agent who had thanked them for putting up with the extra traffic caused by the open house although there were homes listed all the time.
I felt happy and empowered by the feedback. I also noticed an abundance of energy, very different from an afternoon lead generation. I am sure that future clients will come out of this successful morning. I look forward to doing this again - in the morning!

90 Day Pace Challenge - Day 2

Mo Anderson dared me and I signed up to do the 90-Day-Pace Challenge. One of the five cornerstones of my life I have to work on is my health.

First I thought I enter "lower my glucose level" as commitment but it did not feel concrete enough. I know myself. I find loopholes out of general statements like that. So I decided to make my health goal very detailed: I commit to work out in the gym at my work place every work day before I start my 8AM college job. Working out consistently definitely will help lowering my glucose level and improve my overall health.

This is not new. I did that before but not consistent enough. For example, I did not work out for the past three weeks and this break was filled with pies, turkey, and homemade cookies. Now I want to bring consistency in my work out which starts with running on the treadmill and then continues working out on 3 weight-lifting machines assigned by CJ, my personal trainer and college buddy. This will give me enough time to use the staff shower and get ready for my office job. Below is the proof: I worked out at 6:30 AM in the morning - Yay me!

My 90 Day Pace Challenge - Day 1

"I will put my own pace in place to create the space for me to run my race."

This is the essence of the January keynote in my Momentorship program.

Having worked many years for PowerBar fueling marathoners and triathletes, I fully understand  keynote speaker Keith's analogy between running a marathon wisely and starting the new year right.

When  running a marathon, you don't start with a sprint. You create your own pace during training so that you can finish the race instead of falling flat on your face and puke after the first mile or running out of fuel half way.

Guess what, starting the new year with a sprint is not healthy either because in March, you will have abandoned this radical diet or the rigorous gym plan and  all the ideas you started in January for fast success. Been there, done that, many times.

Instead, in my business plan and in my personal life, I will incorporate the 90 Days Pace Challenge which will train me to gradually improve my life in five key elements or cornerstones within the next 36 months - yes, that long, I know, I needed three days to think about it before I gave my commitment in the onlinementorship forum.

To keep record and be able to reflect on these 90 days later,  I will write daily posts on this blog, a 90 Day Pace Challenge Diary so to say. 

Today is Day 1 and here I am, starting to baby-step run a marathon into a healthier way of life with a career worth having.

I will tell you more tomorrow!