A Time-Tracking Exercise for Advisors

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There’s no shortage of apps, self-help books and life coaches that swear they can increase our productivity and profitability. But they start in the same place: by assessing your current productivity. Assessing your time usage is remarkably easy, and the essential first step to a more effective workday.

In today’s article, we want to talk about time – specifically, three time related questions:

  1. How do you want to spend your time?
  2. How are you actually spending your time?
  3. How can you spend more time doing what you want?

How do you want to spend your time?

Financial advisors typically spend their days meeting with clients, handling administrative tasks, creating financial plans and, when time allows, finding new clients. If you had to list these tasks out in order of importance to the health and preservation of your firm, what would you say?

Most advisors would probably list them as follows:

  1. Meeting with clients
  1. Handling administrative tasks (i.e., everything from rebalancing portfolios to reporting to billing)
  1. Creating financial plans
  1. Finding new clients

Every task is of equal importance, right? If you’re not meeting with clients, then your clients aren’t happy. If you’re not managing investments, then client portfolios are getting out of whack (or the SEC is coming after you, or client reports aren’t going out on time, etc.).

And so on.