Working smart by building thinking time into your day
Ask just about anyone these days whether they’re busy and the typical response is “SWAMPED!” - that’s true of advisors and clients alike.
Being busy is good to a point – as long as it’s not the “hamster on the wheel” effect – where the faster we go, the faster the wheel we’re on turns (the source of the expression “spinning our wheels.”)
And being busy is also good provided it doesn’t get in the way of periodically stepping back and thinking about our business – that’s the only way we ensure we’re working smart as well as hard.
In fact, research shows that consistently committing the time to think critically can lead to a dramatic boost in overall productivity.
So how do we go about ensuring we’re “working smart”?
There are five opportunities to build thinking time into your business – you can do this annually, quarterly, monthly, weekly … maybe even daily.
Let’s start by understanding why we’re all so busy.
Partly it’s a function of choppy markets and anxious (and often increasingly demanding) clients.
Today’s “do more with less” mindset doesn’t help.
And of course technology and the internet mean that we’re all drowning in the volume of information that crosses our desks.
In light of that, taking the time to step back and think critically about your business won’t typically happen on its own – you have to make it happen, with different levels of time commitment entailed.
Once a year, say in November or December, you need to step back and spend a day or two preparing your plan of action for the coming year. This means really thinking hard about your business – and needs to be done in a structured format . There are lots of business planning templates out there – one useful example is on the U.S. advisor site Horsesmouth. (There’s a cost to subscribe but a free trial subscription is readily available.)
This can be done along with your team or if you don’t have a team in conjunction with one or two other advisors in your branch; sometimes a branch or firm will hire a facilitator to take a whole room of advisors through this.
The key is to walk away with a plan for the year ahead but also with specific steps laid out for the first 90 days.
Constructing your action plan is only the starting point in thinking about your business, however.
If your year starts in January, you and your team need to carve out half a day a quarter in early April, July and October to review your progress against your plan, identify any course corrections you want to make and set out a plan of action for the next 90 days.
You need to go through the same exercise for the two months between each quarterly session – taking an hour a month to lay out your priorities for the upcoming 30 days at the beginning of February and March for example.
Thinking about your business can also happen weekly. Last year, I wrote a post about how one advisor has advanced his business by taking a few minutes at the end of each week to reflect on what he’d learned in the last seven days and what he would do differently in the week ahead as a result.
You can read this article here: http://www.strategicimperatives.ca/blog/?p=71
The final opportunity for thinking about your business is at the of each day. I recently talked to an advisor who had started wrapping up each day by taking two minutes to go to a file on his computer and answering a couple of questions – what one thing had worked best that day, what had he learned as a result.
Some might say that spending this much time thinking about your business will undermine your ability to get things done.
Add up the time I’m suggesting – a day a year, a half day quarterly, an hour monthly, 15 minutes weekly and 2 minutes daily – and you end up with about 45 hours over the course of the year, or roughly 5% of a hard working advisor’s year.
Bear in mind, you’re not really spending that time – rather, you’re investing it, in order to make the other 95% of your time more productive.
In fact, you may find that spending 5% of your week to step back and think critically about your business may be one of the best investments of time you make.
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