I’m just going to come right out and say it: Don’t touch it unless you are prepared to deal with it. Follow my advice & you will have less stress and feel relieved every day!!!
I’m talking of course about the piles of paperwork and stuff you promise to ‘get to’.
Your Real Estate business creates a LOT of paperwork and unless you deal with it, your life and mind will be cluttered every day.
As Real Estate investors, your time is often limited to after-hours and weekends unless you are doing this full time. Either way, you have to use your time wisely and have a CLEAR mind to focus on what you need to do best:
Building your portfolio.
So the rule is: Touch it once & deal with it
Too Much to Do – Too Little Time
I often hear this from clients when I’m helping organize their business system & what ends up happening is paperwork piles up & is buried under new paperwork daily. They have zero motivation to deal with the mess to get to the ‘touch it once’ system.
What I tell them is simple: Chunk It. Take the piles of paperwork and chunk them down to smaller piles. So now, you have something you can handle rather than one massive mess to sort through.
We continuously procrastinate doing jobs we hate but I agree with Philip McKernan that there is no such thing as procrastination – you just don’t want to do it!! You just decide to do something else with your time.
Real Life Example
I was, and still am to some point a ‘procrastinator’ for lack of a better term and when I applied my chunking idea to the years of receipts I wanted to digitize as suggested in here, it went much smoother.
The amount of scanning I needed to do would take days so I chunked it into months. Interestingly enough, as I finished one month I was eager to move on to the next one.
Psychologically, I was achieving positive results reaching these small goals and it inspired me to continue going. At the same time, if I was to stop after completing a month that was also ok because it was all I had expected when I began. Small steps, positive results = achieving the larger result in the end.
I find looking at the entire task daunting and it’s why I personally don’t want to do it. However when I use this chunking technique, my paperwork seems to disappear right before my eyes. Think of it this way; even if you get just ONE more thing done from the large task, you are still THAT much closer to finishing right?
Try this out and your paperwork may one day be off your desk, organized in a digital filing system as well as physically filed in its proper place for retrieval at a moment’s notice.
How about you? Do you have a system that works? Do you need help with your paperwork? Drop me a note below and share your thoughts.