Attention PM's! How do you stay organized? Lists? Evernote?

[Taylor Wagner]

Hello PM's or Landlords!

I've been in the industry for 6 years as a PM, Maintenance Director, Vacation Rental Management, etc. in Denver, CO, and Breckenridge, CO. I've always struggled with task management/to-do lists and I've been bouncing back and forth with different methods for years. I wanted to solve this problem once and for all by reaching out to the Bigger Pockets community and seeing what platforms, techniques, or methods other landlords/PM's use that works for them. Within my company, other PM's use Excel, Evernote, legal pads, etc. so I understand that there's something different for everyone. 

My current method is making lists/to-do's on a legal pad (highlighting the most important and urgent tasks) and I've been using Evernote for my reference material for years. This has worked great for me but once and a while something falls through the cracks and I'm SICK of carrying around my stack of legal pad sheets! 

ANY advice or tips is greatly appreciated! 

[Anthony Angotti]

@Taylor Wagner

Every task we do we document step by step no matter how small it is. I have my employees handle this because they are basically creating a manual for what they do as they do it. That way there is consistency. Each process has a checklist (reviewing tenants, filling maintenance requests, leasing, etc.) so that each task is done. 

Each unit renovation we track in a google sheet that we fill in blocks for project management. I used to use Microsoft project manager, but with less deliverables than necessary it was more cumbersome than needed. 

We have some of these through our property management software (we use Buildium) and others are just paper sheets. 

All of our weekly meetings we keep minutes/actionable items in evernote so that we can reference back. 

On a personal level I keep a moleskin and update tasks that are one offs. For things that I should be doing as a business owner and personally for consistency I use an app called habits. I sent my consistent tasks on timers that show me how often I am doing them. That could be reviews with employees, marketing tasks, personal things like running, going to gym, etc. It gives me a score for how well I'm completing that task and the gamification of it helps me personally.