Hello there, February! Seems like I was just ringing in the New Year, and already Spring is right around the corner. It's certainly a wake-up call for those of us who can be prone to procrastination. You may see the rest of the year stretching in front of you and feel like you have infinite time to achieve your goals. The truth, however, is that time will fly by.

So, are you ready to sprint? There are some ways to achieve a brisker pace for doing business. By streamlining your workflow and improving your efficiency, these tech tools can free you up to sell more real estate and keep that swift pace moving. Here are a few ideas to get you going:

1) Electronic Signatures

If you're driving around town, it should be because you're showing properties and meeting with clients to take on new listings—not gathering signatures on real estate documents. With electronic signatures, the process is infinitely swifter and requires zero legwork on your part.

As Jeremy Lehman, a real estate professional in Southern California, explains in his video on DocuSign.com, "At the Boutique Real Estate Group, our agents are in the field all day, every day. I mean, we're rarely in the office, so we really take advantage of mobile technology to get our jobs done wherever we are." He continues, "After using Cartavi [document management] and DocuSign together, it has really streamlined the process of working with all the other parties involved in a real estate transaction. The benefits to using DocuSign in our business are the fact that we don't have to meet with our customers to sign documents when it's not necessary. We can simply email documents to our clients and they can open them up and click to sign."

2) CRM

The new year is an excellent time to reach out to past clients and touch base, hoping to drum up repeat business. Do you have the time to dig through your email inbox, your day planner, and your iPhone looking for contacts and trying to recall when you last interacted with them? If not, it's time to leverage a CRM.

A CRM doesn't just organize your contacts; it actually makes it quicker and easier to reach out to them. Most leading real estate CRMs offer campaigns to help you stay in touch. These campaigns include pre-populated email messages and other marketing collateral that can be almost entirely hands-off for you. If you're not busy digging up contacts, calendaring reminders, and crafting messages to each of them, you'll have much more time to grow your business.

3) Transaction Management and Document Management

The organizational gymnastics of a typical real estate transaction can be a drain on time and energy. Documents, parties to a transaction, milestones, and tasks are threads that can become horribly tangled. Transaction management and document management solutions aim to untangle these threads, automate some of the processes, and ultimately make agents more efficient. The increased efficiency can free you up for achieving your resolution to make your business bigger and better in 2014.

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Which tools do you plan to use to make 2014 your most successful, efficient year ever? Comment below to share with other agents and brokers.