Why Your To-Do List Is Laughing At You

Being organized and clear puts you on the path to success

Insider

Contributing Writer

Benjamin Franklin once said, “For every minute spent organizing, an hour is earned.” We’re all looking for more hours in the day and getting organized is a sure-fire way to make sure you maximize your time and set yourself up for success, regardless of the current state of the market.

To many people, organizing your thoughts and work just sounds like one more thing to add to the ever-growing to-do list, but let’s look at the benefits of being organized to better understand how important it actually is.

Know Your Needs

First of all, getting organized helps you know your needs. Starting your day by simply getting organized can help you efficiently accomplish so much more. Having a clear expectation for what your customers, team, and partners need from you helps ensure you stay on track to get everything done.

You can apply this to any area of your work. Take meetings, for example. Before you meet with someone, ask yourself: who am I talking to? Which programs may be appropriate for them? What collateral do I need? What am I trying to accomplish? Is this a pre-approval or application? Is this a purchase transaction or a refinance? This simple exercise helps you be more prepared and, in turn, maximizes your time with customers, partners, or whoever you’re meeting with. We can all agree that there is nothing worse than an unproductive meeting and nothing better than a quick and efficient one.

Be More Accurate

Being organized also helps you be more accurate. To put it bluntly, sloppy work often brings a sloppy end product. Organization will help you know exactly what you need from your customer and what you already have — meaning, you can take a complete application with less back and forth — and fewer errors.

I’ve said it once — or 50 times — and I’ll say it again: it’s your job as the loan officer (LO) to take a complete and accurate application. If you are organized and clear with your borrower, it will put you both on the path to success. And your processors and underwriters will thank you too.

Manage Your Goals

We’ve also talked about goal setting and goal management many times before and organization is key here, as well. You cannot reach your goals if you are not clear on what you are working toward. You may think you have your goals in order, but could you list them out or write them down? If not, your goals are probably not as organized as you think.

Having organized goals also is critical for your team. Be sure you have clear expectations for what you want to see completed daily, weekly, or quarterly. This helps everyone do their part in working toward that goal. It’s easy to think of goals as big-picture plans for the year, but goals also can be as simple as a to-do list for the day.

Your team cannot effectively execute if you are not organized and clear with what the team needs to accomplish. Taking a small amount of time to be clear about goals can pay off tremendously when your team is able to work efficiently to reach them.

If you are organized and clear with your borrower, it will put you both on the path to success.

Delegate Your Work

Speaking of your team, you are all there to help each other. When you are organized and clear, it also helps identify areas where you can delegate to another team member and prioritize areas where you cannot pass the work. As the LO, you are the only one that can take the application or talk about rates and products. By law, your processors cannot handle any of that.

With this in mind, it’s important to understand how your organization is structured so you know who can assist with certain tasks and who cannot.

Delegation is not about passing every task off to someone else, but rather it’s about maximizing everyone’s time. There is likely someone on your team that has some extra time in their day and by delegating a small task to them, it could free you up to do the important tasks that no one else can handle. The bottom line is, your company is organized the way it is for a reason. Be mindful of that and understand how you can use that structure to maximize your time and reach your goals.

Organization is not an extra step but a necessary one if you want to be successful. Taking the time to get organized can lead to better outcomes for you, your team, your borrowers, and your partners.