No Mortgage Management Method

No Mortgage Management Method

Mortgages are encumbrances on your future earnings somewhat restricting your liberty by requiring you to divert a portion of your future earnings to the lender.

Less widely considered are the mortgages we create by putting ourselves in a position to have to do something in the future. This is no less than a financial lien on our earnings that is created by a mortgage. Some of the ways such mortgages are generated and ways to avoid them are illustrated here.

Mortgage creation
Some of the ways mortgages are created:

• Assuming responsibilities that cannot be easily or appropriately handled or that you have no realistic possibility to complete timely or that is above or below your “pay grade”
• Setting unrealistic deadlines to deliver client projects
• Overloading staff that are being counted on to provided projects on time Not concentrating on your MIT (most important thing)
• Passing over the MIT for various easy to complete but unimportant tasks
• Neglecting to train staff properly
• Not carefully explaining what needs to be accomplished
• Not fully understanding your role or what you need to do
• Making mistakes caused by rushing your work
• Inadequate preparation or planning
• Insufficient equipment or support
• ____________________________ (Everybody has their own ways of creating mortgages for themselves)

Ways to avoid mortgages
Do not do anything described in previous paragraph.

Watch the TIOs, DINs, MITs
My 3 catchphrases are TIO, DIN and MIT: Touch it Once; Do it Now; Most Important Thing.

TIO: Failure to dispose of something the first time you touch it creates a mortgage comprised of extra future touches or handling. It doesn’t just refer to physical handling; it can be a delayed or tentative decision; the need to get back to someone; something you will need to look at a later time; or have to touch at a later time for any other reason. [Just by keeping it untouched for any reason means it will have to be touched at some time later.] All of these create mortgages on your time and energy. I am not talking about work projects that take time and require being supervised or supervising someone and the necessary interactions to get the project completed properly and on time. I am referring to the myriad interruptions, questions and requests we get continuously and things push aside so we can think about it later. Touching something once without doing something with it or about it, or failing to assign or pass it on to someone in a better position to respond or even assigning it to yourself with a definite time it will be worked on and then communicating that to the person needing your response will create a mortgage. Putting it in a pile, on a list or leaving it highlighted in your in box creates the mortgage.

DIN: If it is something that is necessary for you to do, doing it right away will get it done and out. Putting it aside, unless it is scheduled for an appropriate time, just increases your mortgage. Realistically, most things cannot be done on demand but you can set aside a period such as an hour a day to deal with incoming mail, emails and requests and make your decisions then or you can simply decide not to do it at all. Many delayed decisions are actually a decision to ignore. If that is the case, face reality and let the person know it will not be done or that you are not the right person it should have been sent to. Having to touch something more than once creates a future responsibility or obligation and that is the mortgage.

MIT: Your time should be spent only on important things allocated between urgent and nonurgent projects. Nothing else should consume your time. “Consume” can be described as something that eats up, devours, or masticates your time. Further you can only have one MIT. More than one doesn’t fit into what “most” means. Decide what your MIT is and then work on that possibly to the exclusion of everything else. To be effective everything you need to do cannot and should not always be urgent, so you should start to allocate your time to work on your important projects which may not be urgent. If it is that important and urgent, either make it your MIT or maybe it is not as important as you think. Keep in mind that you need to apportion your time to work on other important projects forestalling them from creeping into the urgent category and then becoming an MIT. Anything that is not important should be treated as such and as also not being worthy of your time and as something that would increase your mortgage debt if you assumed a responsibility for it.

Important but not MIT: A comment about work other than your MIT. Not everything you do can be an MIT at that moment, but if it is in the important category, then proper scheduling can have that done in a more or less routine manner and while it would never jump to the MIT classification, it will get done without the crises of urgency which moves many important projects into MIT status.

Conclusion
Sound management requires effective appreciation of your time and realistic capabilities. Mortgage mitigation, elimination, or eradication needs to be a major goal of self-management. You cannot get out of mortgage debt by continuing to assume new mortgages. So, start today – handle your existing debt anyway you want, but do not add any new mortgages to the list. TIO, DIN, MIT!