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Beverly Flaxington is a practice management consultant. She answers questions from advisors facing human resource issues. To submit yours, email us here.
Dear Readers,
I’m writing this column in advance; soon I’ll be traveling overseas to retrieve my youngest from her second opportunity to study abroad. I’m excited she has had great travel and learning opportunities and I am very happy to be bringing her home.
As I prepare to travel, deal with a parent recently diagnosed with a very rare and fatal cancer (and with all the doctor visits that entails), continue to support clients and finish up teaching my graduate classes for the semester, I’m reminded of the importance of managing priorities and time. Everything matters, and our lives can become fire drills. When important things happen, somehow we find the time to do what’s needed and still get everything else done! In many cases, when I provide learning experiences or coaching to clients, the obstacle of “not enough time” gets raised. In this column, I’ll share some insights about how you can (mostly) “do it all” if you are prepared and organized enough to do so.
1. Prioritize. There are so many distractions in today’s world of constant streaming news, videos, input from friends, information and so on. One could spend hours just looking at social media. It’s easy to lose time doing mindless things or doing things we find easy and non-threatening! First thing when you get up in the morning (or even the night before), identify in writing the three most important things you need to do that day. It isn’t that you won’t do many others, but if you keep those three things right in front of you, you will be drawn to do what’s needed to move them forward.
2. Redo your to-do list. Everyone I know creates a to-do list of one form or another. “Respond to Client A on estate plan,” “Schedule time with Prospect B for reviewing financial plan,” “Make plans with friends for this weekend,” and so on. These types of things often appear on a to-do list. But each of these things is actually multiple to-dos. To respond to my client on their estate plan means reviewing the plan, talking with the lawyer, organizing my thoughts, writing down what the client needs to do and generally gathering the information I need. We call this “chunking” – the importance of breaking down tasks into smaller, discreet steps to make it easier to implement each one. Review your to-do list and chunk it, then organize it based on priority items (going back to step number one). Do this every day.
3. Have a plan for managing emails. If you are not using the “rules” function in your email program, start today. Create folders for each common incoming email you receive. I have one for every client, prospect, team member and general category. It’s also great for organizing the “Not urgent” things that come in, including newsletters, internal company updates, solicitor emails, etc. This allows you to focus on one client or topic at a time and respond accordingly. You also want to create a “follow-up” folder, a “waiting for response” folder and a “someday” folder to put emails in these three categories for easier responses.
4. Use the four Ds for any incoming message, whether call or email. Delete, delegate, drop or do. Don’t keep opening the email, closing it and then thinking you will deal with it later. Open it, then execute one of the four Ds.
5. Calendar everything. I even recommend calendaring “thinking time.” I often do this when I am creating a new strategic initiative or developing a new extensive program for a client. It takes time to think about what you could do, need to do and should do. Then break down each step of what you need to do and put it on your calendar. I know this sounds tedious, but it really does work. If you break it down, calendar it and then see it pop up on your calendar, it seems more doable and less avoidable!
6. Engage others in your process. Delegation is challenging for many of us; sometimes it is just easier to do something yourself. However, if you are executing on everything you will eventually run out of hours in the day. It’s why I particularly like chunking – what smaller components of what you need to do can you give to someone else? There are so many outside resources to leverage today, too – places like elance.com, guru.com, and fiverr.com have people you can hire to do some small tasks. Of course, don’t delegate something that is client confidential or otherwise critical to your firm, but the small things can be done by someone else.
7. Complete a time tracking exercise at least twice a year. Spend two weeks keeping track of what you are doing in 15-minute increments. You can do this in an Excel spreadsheet, Word document, or even a notebook. At the end of the two weeks, review each piece and label it red (for “should not have done it”), yellow (for “maybe, not sure”) and green (for “right on!”). This helps you be more efficient, even as you are tracking your time, because it makes you pause as you write down what you are doing.
8. Use an app – there are so many for time management. I don’t use all of these but have heard great things about them: Monday.com and Smartsheet are very popular. On-phone apps Smile Todo and Focus To-Do are both highly rated. I encourage our readers to write in about others they are using to good effect.
The most important thing when it comes to managing your time, priorities and life is to get your priorities straight in the first place. It can be helpful to think in categories: work, family, spiritual, health, charitable inclinations and so on. We often move so quickly from thing to thing we don’t realize the emphasis we are putting in one area (usually work) to the detriment of other areas. We always think there will be more time for us to catch up somehow. If you don’t recognize what you want to do, and you don’t have plan for how you are going to focus, you won’t get to where you want to go.
Each of us is given 24 hours every single day. This translates to 86,400 seconds. In my graduate class I ask the students how much attention they might give to $86,400.00 if someone gifted it to them tomorrow. Everyonewould think and plan for this amount of gifted money. We are given the same “gift” every single day, and yet many people squander what they are given; they simply run from one thing to the other, not focused on what they really care about.
Capture what matters to you. Then prioritize daily what you need to do to make progress. Then get organized around how you can chunk, calendar, monitor and delegate. Once you start to practice this, you won’t believe how much you can accomplish in a given day. Enjoy your time and make sure you use it for something important – to you.
Beverly Flaxington co-founded The Collaborative, a consulting firm devoted to business building for the financial services industry, in 1995. The firm also founded and manages the Advisors Sales Academy. The firm has won the Wealthbriefing WealthTech award for Best Training Solution for 2022, 2023 and 2024. Beverly is currently an adjunct professor at Suffolk University teaching undergraduate and graduate students Entrepreneurship and Leading Teams. She is a Certified Professional Behavioral Analyst (CPBA) and Certified Professional Values Analyst (CPVA).
She has spent over 25 years in the investment industry and has been featured in Selling Power Magazine and quoted in hundreds of media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, MSNBC.com, Investment News and Solutions Magazine for the FPA. She speaks frequently at investment industry conferences and is a speaker for the CFA Institute.
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Advisor Perspectives welcomes guest contributions. The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.