How overwhelmed are you right now?  What is helping you to get through your daily process?  The speed technology is growing at is phenomenal.  Look back just a couple of years and remind yourself what kind of phone or laptop you had.  What do you have now?  Step back in that same period and ask if the words Twitter, blog, Smartphone, HD, terawatt, were words you used on a regular basis or even knew about.  Technology was designed to help streamline our daily process.  Do you find that to be the case in your daily routine?

From my observations discipline with our processes is so crucial right now.  Perhaps more than ever this is the case.  Here are some questions that may help our analysis.

1. Company Decisions: Is there a shorter period of time necessary to make decisions within the company or longer in comparison to a couple of years ago?
2. Do we have a few projects on the board that are accomplished in a few weeks or numerous projects that are stretched over numerous months?
3. Responding to correspondence:  Whether its correspondence via phone or email.  How quick were you able to respond a couple of years ago as opposed to the present?

Now I know these questions are very general and the reasons behind your answers will be as a result of numerous variables, but do you understand the gist of where we are presently?  Now we throw in social media and all of its platforms and questions about our processes become even bigger.  It seems like every day there is something new we need to learn just to stay ahead of the curve.  A couple of days a new social media platform was released which I will call “Moogle Fuzz”. (I don’t want to be accused of using a key word just to draw attention)  We know this trend will only continue to grow.  At the moment there does not seem to be a plateau in sight.

That circles back to the discipline part of this post.  How are we training ourselves and how are we training our staff to deal with this onslaught?  The multifamily industry is already a very fast paced environment whether its onsite or at the corporate office.  I am curious to get your take on this topic, so please comment below.

Mark Juleen and Duncan Alney will be driving deeper into using technology platforms from an integration perspective at Optimization Summits this March.  The education from this event will certainly be phenomenal.  As you will see from the video below, they will be providing education on how to use these tools effectively and have them work for you.

Written by Jonathan Saar