Yep! You can take all those things that you've ever been taught about "prioritizing" and toss it all out the window! 
What you have been taught throughout your business careers is dead wrong!
I can only assume that you've had similar speakers come to your offer and talk about time management and how to prioritize, etc. I know that starting way back in 1984, when I got into real estate, my sales manager would bring these guys and gals in. They seemed to have it all together. Starched white shirt and tie for the men and attractive business suit with a scarf for the women (Did you ever notice that these female speakers were always hot?)
Anyway, they would get up there and tell you that you needed to make a "to do" list at the beginning of each day and to prioritize the list with the most important and pressing things listed at the top and the rest of everything else in descending order of importance. Then you were to go to work on these most important things and get done what you could get done. The items that you didn't get done would be available to be put back on the next days list. If they were more important that next day because you didn't get them done the day before, then so be it. If they weren't that important that day either, then they would end up at the bottom of the list again.
For years I did something similar to this and I'll admit, it is an effective way of making sure that the big ticket, direct money making things get done. I noticed a flaw in the design the other day though.
Yesterday I wrote about how Marketing Is Like Working Out where I talked about how I bumped into a FSBO that had utilized my company's service a number of years before and had a wonderful experience with us. Yet, he still went FSBO. I realized that I had dropped the ball by not marketing to my previous clients in a consistent manner. I then compared it to how marketing needs to be done every day or at least on a regular basis just like working out does.
Well, last night as I laid there in bed thinking about you all out there in AR land and wondering why nobody had commented on that particular post (was it because I tied the post to exercising????) something dawned on me. One of the reasons that I don't work out as consistently as I should or get my marketing done as I should is that there is a conflict between my prioritization techniques and working out and marketing.
That conflict is that working out is not going to make me a buck today. Nor is sending out post cards to people who I just sold a house to last month or even a year ago. Today the most important thing that I need to do is to catch up with that no good, lazy butt appraiser who has been promising me that report for a week now. After that, I need to upload that new listing to my web sites. After that, so forth and so on....until it's time to call the kids and tell them that I love them and to crash out.
At the end of the day, I will have accomplished a good amount, but with my old system I probably would not have gotten my work out in or sat down and made contact with any of my previous clients. Not that it isn't worthwhile, but because these activities weren't urgent enough to make it to today. Utilizing my current system I'll probably run into a previous client who was happy with us yet was selling their home FSBO because it was never all that urgent that I stay in touch with him or her.
So, as of today, I'm going to start with the unimportant things. I woke up and got my workout in. Then I started compiling a list of my previous clients to enter into a database. No, neither of these activities is going to make me money in the short run, but in the long run they are both going to pay off!
R.B. "Bob" Mitchell
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