To be successful, loan officers need to be in control of their time. Time-management skills aren’t always taught in school or in a course. More often, these are skills we learn and develop through our own experiences. As a loan officer, you need to consider the specific challenges and constraints you face on a regular basis to better understand what you need when it comes to time management. Though we may all have different strategies that work best for us, there are some more general skills that almost all professionals can benefit from. Whether your schedule is feeling unmanageable, or you’d simply like to give your efficiency a boost, here are some of the most important things loan officers can do for their time-management efforts:
Be Proactive
What are your most frequent distractions? What time of day do you start to lose focus? When are you most productive? Taking the time to engage with these types of questions can help loan officers to be better prepared to manage their time well. It might sound simple, but these are the foundation for an effective time-management strategy. When you’re simply ‘trying to be more productive’ or ‘striving to avoid distractions’ there’s a lot of ambiguity that can weaken your efforts. Instead, if you identify the certain websites, coworkers, or thought streams that regularly distract you, you’re much more equipped to avoid them or navigate them more successfully.
Break Bad Habits
One of the best ways to improve our time-management skills is to do a clean-up of sorts. Which habits are sabotaging your efforts and holding you back? Striving to eliminate these bad habits first can often be more effective than trying to incorporate new strategies. You want to create a strong foundation before you start building up. If you have some bad habits that are draining your productivity, make it your goal to tackle those first, then you can start to employ more specific strategies to work even more efficiently.
Utilize Your Schedule
Some professionals use their schedules and calendars simply to record scheduled meetings. When it comes to their own time, they manage it in their heads or as things come along. Unfortunately, this can often leave some important tasks untouched at the end of the day. There is a sense that the time flies by, and we simply have too much to focus on. Using your schedule to harness your focus is a highly effective way to strengthen your time management. For example, you might mark off Monday from 8-8:30am as an email window. You can review all your new messages, send replies where you need to, and ensure you’re all caught up. Rather than doing this in pieces throughout the morning as you work through other tasks, single-tasking and devising clear windows for yourself can help you take control of your time.
Customize
We all work differently. There isn’t one perfect time-management strategy out there for everyone. Instead, we all need to engage in the process of experimentation to figure out what works. If you want to really supercharge your time-management skills, start developing some strategies based on your specific needs. Technology is an amazing tool here. Finding an app or two to support your productivity is a great way to customize your strategy. Also, tuning into your own workflow, the times that you’re more productive and the times that you’re more likely to be distracted, can help you design your schedule for maximum productivity.
For professionals to manage the countless demands they face on a daily basis and still have time to think about future growth, they need to have strong time-management skills to help them work at their most productive. As we head into the new year, now is a great time to evaluate your time management skills and implement improvements where needed to have you better equipped to achieve you goals for the new year. What are some time-management strategies that you use to stay on track? Please share them with us.
Kirk Brewer
Branch Manager | Loan Geek | NMLS #150287