Time management is a crucial skill for everyone, but it comes into play in a big way if you are a property manager. After all, it’ll be a reflection of your work ethic and general management skills for your tenants to see, which can greatly impact your business. If you’ve been feeling particularly stressed out lately, it may be because your handling of time-sensitive issues has not been as efficient as it could be. While these changes can be difficult in the beginning, they’ll bring about only positive results for your property and will shape your management for a more organized and effective future of work.
One place to start is to regularly take some time and prioritize what needs to be done within that week or month. Something that happens too often is that managers get bogged down with e-mails, phone calls, or other messages and then spend an inordinate amount of time attending to those with no method. As a result, a lot of the day is spent attending to these communications, and while communication is another major part of property management, there is much more that needs to be done in a day’s time. Schedule a specific amount of time for this activity, but don’t allow yourself to be a slave to alerts whenever they arise. These interruptions will distract from other, important work that needs to be done, so make a time commitment and stick to it, no matter how many times your phone beeps later (unless, of course, it’s an emergency).
An important point to consider is the difference between “clock time” and “real time.” They’re fairly straightforward; clock time is the literal passing of time, while real time is how people perceive the passing of time based on what they’re doing. Luckily, the latter is directed entirely by the person, and thus “anything you create, you can manage.” This is an important concept to keep in mind as you begin to form good time management habits.
Once you begin to make these small changes in your schedule, you’ll feel more in control of things, which will help you going forward. A next step would be to begin to be honest with yourself about how you spend your time. If you know already that you’re wasting more time than you should be, marking down the actual amount wasted in hours and minutes might be the motivation you need to change your habits. A problematic habit that many people develop is creating to-do lists and then rarely accomplishing the list items. A remedy is to assign times to these activities so that you have a specific piece of the day in which you can hold yourself accountable. Make sure that the earliest-deadline activities or the high-priority ones are marked as such so they don’t slip past your radar.
Everything seems easier to tackle when looked at on a day to day basis. Begin your morning with a chunk of time in which you schedule the activities for the rest of that particular day. Things will seem less daunting if you plan a day at a time, so wake up and note what you need to do and when. This will make your day seem more manageable before you even really get to work. Later, when approaching those items, “decide what result you want to attain. This will help you know what success looks like before you start.” After that, you can better assess how everything went and shape how the experience should be when it next comes up. This is helpful particularly if you’ve interacted with your tenants in some way, so that you can better attend to their needs.
Returning to the issue of phones and e-mail; don’t be a slave to your technology. Answer a message if it requires an immediate response or if the situation is an emergency, but if you give the impression that you can be contacted at any given time for every small detail, then your tenants won’t hesitate to take advantage. From there, you’ll lose out on a lot of valuable time when trying to get other work done which will then be only half-done or put on the back burner. Instead, make sure that your tenants know specific hours in which they can reach you to maximize the rest of your day.
Though changing your habits is a great place to start when working toward better time management, don’t forget that SKYLINE property management & accounting software can make your life much simpler. This powerful program makes sure that you can complete your projects and manage your accounts without you having to do much at all. Let SKYLINE work for you, assuring investor return, boosting the performance of your property, and impressing tenants with its functionality. SKYLINE fits anywhere into your schedule and saves time with its streamlined database and special features. Leave strategy and support to this technology solution so that you can worry less about the finer details and focus more on creating a functional schedule that works for you.