Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
If a real estate professional intends to operate efficiently from anywhere using online tools, then it's very important to have a functional task management system. It is critical that we manage our time, as well as the many deadlines and deliveries associated with buyer or seller side transactions.
Well, you don't have to take a back seat to even the most sophisticated and high dollar systems if you do it right. Again, though there are a few trade-offs in functionality, I've found them to be acceptable for the convenience and ease of posting using Google and Remember the Milk (RTM).
You'll need to go to RememberTheMilk.com and set up a free account. Once you've done that, you can set up preferences and take a tour of the features. The fact is, if you use all the views and structure in this tutorial, you will not have to go into RTM itself that often. Your tasks, once you tie into your Google Calendar (Gcal), will show up in the calendar as an expandable box each day. You can add tasks in multiple ways:
I tested another very similar service at ToodleDo.com. I found RTM to be better for my use in several ways. However, you might want to check out the other one for your purposes. The main trade-off with RTM is in the process of setting up a transaction. You can email in a list of tasks, but you can't associate a date with each in the email. So I set up a text file in WordPad that I pull up by type of deal, like "land buyer tasks."
This has the name of each of the tasks and document deliveries normally associated with a buyer side land deal. When I get a new deal, I open that list and copy the content into an email. I send it to the address specified for my import in RTM. All the tasks show up, and I log in and set the dates for each. I find that this is usually only a 15 to 20 minute job.
The time it takes to enter these dates is dramatically off-set by other conveniences of using RTM in conjunction with Gmail. Just set up your task lists in a text file and copy/paste them into an email to get them into RTM. You create a folder for each transaction, and the subject of the email tells RTM where to put them. Then you can set up reminders to text you each day with tasks, or email you with them, or both.
There is also an add-on for Gmail that will display your tasks on the right side of your Gmail screen. I used it for a while, but found that I like having it on the igoogle home page with everything else. I also use a notebook computer with a 12 inch screen, so losing the space on the right made my email space too small for my liking. The point is that you have multiple ways to display your tasks, just as you have multiple ways to get them into the system.
photo credit: Ben (Falcifer) via photopin cc
