It’s that time of year again. Everything is piling up. You can’t seem to stay ahead of the ridiculously long list of things you have to accomplish, and you have an impossibly small amount of time to complete them. Maybe your brilliant closing agent, Steve, just came down with a fever, and three new clients want to close on a property tomorrow….
Yep, we have all been there! Whether we like it or not, it is a reality of being a title agent: the sea of to-do lists never stops coming.
These to-do lists can be cumbersome, but the fact of the matter is that finishing these tasks on-time and in an organized fashion makes the difference between a successful and unsuccessful business. In other words, managing your tasks is essential. And, odds are you have been making mistakes that you didn’t even realize you were making.
Here are 5 ways to counteract the most common task management mistakes.
- Delegate Delegate Delegate…. Delegate.
You work with a team…. use your team. When times get tough, it is so tempting to put everything on your back and do the work all by yourself, but this. Slows. You. Down. (seriously, you’re not being a hero). Instead of doing it all alone, get organized and delegate. With Qualia’s software, you can easily delegate tasks, and you can also customize your settings so that all future orders have the tasks divvied out ahead of time. That way, every time an order comes in, you don’t need to re-assign every little detail of the project (it has already been done for you!). - Set Deadlines… ON EVERYTHING.
You might say something like this: it’s such a small task, and I’ll do it this afternoon. All I have to do is make one measly phone call, so there is no need to write down a deadline for that. WRONG! Wrong. wrong. Set a deadline. You have a million things going on all at once, and we all know what what will happen… Your phone call will slip by unnoticed, and in the title business, this can be fatal. Qualia’s software allows you to set these deadlines in advance in the workflow template. That way any time you create a task the deadline has already been set for you. Then, when you forget (which of course you will…), Qualia’s software will remind you. - Automate your task completion
Imagine how nice it would be if, whenever you sent out a CPL, it was checked off your to-do list without you knowing… This is what Qualia offers with their automated task completion option. You can adjust the settings so that when the task is completed, Qualia’s software will mark it as such. This will allow you to spend much more of your time working forward on future tasks and not second-guessing yourself about what is done and what is not done. - Use a template for your orders
Every client and every situation is different. However, there are many similarities. With Qualia’s software you can build customized workflows for future orders. With this tool at your disposal, you will be organized in seconds after creating an order. Your work will be delegated, timelines will be set, and your to-do list will be ready to go. - Track your past task management!
In traditional task management systems with pen and paper, it is almost impossible to track your past behavior. Thrown out sticky-notes, erased whiteboards, and discarded paper lists do not exactly give you much information about your past accomplishments. This does not leave much room for improvement. With Qualia’s workflow tools, you can view past orders, and you can easily track what has been done, what hasn’t been done, and whether or not you are performing tasks in a timely fashion. This will help you to understand and manage client relationships much more easily.
Want to see automated task management in action? You can watch a recording of our recent webinar on it here.
