How do you guys stay organized?
Hey guys - I've slowly been taking on more and more responsibility at my firm. Its a small shop so we all wear a lot of different hats. What's the best way to stay organized? I need to keep track of potential deals (even though there aren't many at the moment) along with scheduling maintenance, quoting and scheduling renovations, staying on top of brokers, quarterly reporting etc.
I've thought about using a CRM, but wanted to know how everyone else does it. Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
I use a combination of two methods:
I keep a pretty detailed list in Outlook with quarterly reminders and monthly reminders for stuff like "Hey, every third Thursday of the month is when I have to send out the preferred equity invoicing, and on the 1st I do senior loan calcs and update the portfolio, etc.) That's mostly for the simple recurring stuff.
For everything else, I have a moleskin notebook that I keep at my desk. Every night, I create a numbered list with everything that I need to do in general (ex. underwrite x property, call y broker, get through z% of the buyout log) for the next day. I rank them by urgency. Every day I try to get through the list, crossing stuff out. If it doesn't get crossed out, it moves to next day's list.
Very rudimentary I know, but effective. Learned this from my old boss in college who started his own development firm - said he needed it to keep track of the important shit when you're wearing a thousand hats at once.
I use a daily planner to keep track of things I have going on at work and appointments/events/reservations and plans I have in my personal life. I use the Runwell Planner from Shinola. I also use OneNote to keep track of things I have to do every day. I have a page with a chart and each row is a day of the week and I fill each day with every task I've done or need to do, so I can look back at any day even a year ago and see exactly what I worked on that day. I also have two notebooks, just cheap ones I got at walgreens. One is organized and has sticky notes to break-up pages by project/task and the other notebook is just sloppy notes and isn't structured in any way. I'm a bigger fan of using pen and paper than digital notes or organizing. I tried using an iPad as a daily planner and it wasn't for me.
I keep a to-do list and use outlook (both emails and calendars) as reminders. I flirted with some of the fancy to do lists in the past and always found that keeping up with them took way too much time, so the notes app on my iphone (that syncs with my ipad) is where I write things down and outlook is where I set reminders and keep emails as unread until I respond.
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