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Financial Advisors: Free Up Time: Don’t Do Everything.

By ClientWise | April 18, 2013


There was a nice post the other day by Elizabeth Grace Saunders on the Harvard Business Review Blog Network, "How to Allocate Your Time, and Your Effort".

 

My takeaways from her post were this:

 

  • Time is finite: Our time is a fixed resource. No one has time for everything.
  • Strategic: Liberate yourself from non-essential activities by deciding that you will NOT do everything.
  • Tactical: Divvy up your activities into three categories: Essential, Neutral, and Detrimental. Focus on the essential ones. Avoid the detrimental ones.

 

In her own words, “Given the pace of work and the level of input in modern society, time management is dead. You can no longer fit everything in — no matter how efficient you become.” 

For busy and successful financial advisors, this thinking has interesting implications. By their nature, financial advisors are a can-do breed. Adopting the mind-set that it’s ok not to do everything might be a real shift for some. But at the same time, it might be really liberating.

Think of the issue from another and invert it on its head. Consider this:

  • What’s the opportunity cost in spending your time on non-essential activities? In other words, what opportunities are you missing by doing things that don’t move you forward?
  • Identify those activities that you do daily, weekly, monthly or whatever that are non-essential, or neutral or detrimental to use the phrases above.
  • Take these non-essential activities and build a not to-do list. And don’t do them.
 
 
Use this complimentary ClientWise Learning Tool and build a list of essential marketing activities: 
 
 
 
 
 
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Topics: Operations

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