Planning Your Day
How are you prioritizing your day as a maintenance technician? We do a lot of different things from a lot of different skills, uh, in using a lot of different trades. I mean, just think about today, for instance, many maintenance technicians. You begin the day by working on curb appeal, meaning you're running around the property picking up trash or debris that was left behind or has fallen behind.
From that point, maybe you go and perform, make ready repairs, and make ready repairs. You're an inspector, you are documenting expenses, you are communicating with the office and vendors. And then finally, you're actually getting to do the work, which may mean things as diverse as installing caulking, replacing a toilet, uh, uh, charging an air conditioning unit.
All of these different tasks happen before lunch. Then after lunch, we go to do service requests, which if you take a look at the handle, the quantity of service requests that are in your app, chances are they pull from trades like electrician, plumber, carpenter, locksmith. All of these things happen. So that means.
With a day that's in front of us with myriad tasks of an infinite amount of skill sets. It's important to have a process to triage or to order what happens first to what happens last on a daily basis. It's good idea at this point to ensure that you are on your, on the same page with your property manager.
Your community leader needs to have an understanding of what's going on in a daily basis because those priorities that we end up following may change on a dime. Begin with prioritizing with what is the most important part. Now, arguably the most important part is the outward perception. Because on an apartment main MA apartment property, we are a business first and foremost.
That means it needs to be attractive to customers when we have vacant apartments that we need people to move into, which is always, we need new people to want to come to our property, therefore. The highest priority items are those that make it attractive to other residents. This is why I started in the example with picking up trash, ensuring the outward appearance of the property is pleasing to new residents.
Frequently, that's called curb appeal, and often that takes the highest priority every day of scheduled tasks. Because you and I both know that maintenance is based on things breaking. We are at the property and we are to respond when things break. So another idea or another thing to ensure that we are on the same page with our property manager is on the priority of things.
The frequent statement for prioritizing is fire, flood, or blood. That means that anything that puts our building into jeopardy of a intentional or unintentional nature that we can prevent should be done preventing pipe breaks so that we cause a flood preventing. Um. Issues that are of a life safety nature, such as fire performing electrical repairs, or if a resident calls and says that something is sparking or could cause a fire.
These are items that end up getting put to the front of any, any prioritization. The third part of that, the blood part that's preventing injury. But here we're talking about injury to any person. That means that high priority items are those that can injure a resident and employee, or even for us maintenance technicians, the one that is frequently forgot us using.
The skills of ensuring that we're on the same page with our property manager and having a plan at the beginning of every day that that plan includes what is important to our property manager is a great place to start prioritizing the tasks that we must complete every single day.
