Time Management for Advisors: Strategies and Tools to Compound the Value of Your Time

By Jody Jacobson

Time is one of an advisor’s most precious and elusive commodities. Managing time more effectively is a top priority for advisors who want to achieve bigger things. In this article, I give you strategies and tools to compound the value of the time you invest in work.

At year-end, most advisors set critical goals for the coming year. Maybe you want to improve team performance, implement a succession plan, increase per-client revenues, get more clients, or finally complete a goal you keep putting off. Then, when busy-ness as usual sets back in after the glow of year-end goal-setting events and holiday celebrations, big goals and intentions often fade away.

If this sounds familiar, you are not alone. According to numerous studies in the U.S. and U.K., just 9% to 14% of people achieve their New Year’s resolutions. Most abandon them by late January, and 80% fail by mid-February! In firms and organizations, this failure to achieve new strategic initiatives is called drifting goals. 

Why Does Managing Time Feel like a Never-Ending Struggle? 

Managing time is a lot like resolving to lose weight, eat healthier, exercise more, or drink less. You know it will help you feel better now and sustain longer-term success. Yet, your ability to manage time is not as simple as choosing the right menu item, moving more, or remembering to hydrate.

Let’s explore three leading obstacles advisors face.

1. Your ability to manage your time is not completely under your control.

For one thing, stuff happens: the SEC tags you for an exam, the market declines and clients panic, a team member gives notice, you or a loved one gets sick, or a pandemic happens. Likewise, many advisors work in firms where others enter appointments into their calendars.

2. How you manage time is a learned habit reinforced by well-worn behavioral grooves known as neural networks.

These must and can be reprogrammed to achieve meaningful behavioral changes over time. Doing so may require advisors to (a) change default ways of thinking and working, and (b) practice new behaviors consistently over time. A study in the European Journal of Psychology in 2009 estimates that, on average, it takes 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic, with the typical range being 18 to 254 days.

3. Effective time management strategies prioritize doing the right things—not pressuring yourself and others to work harder and longer.

Experienced advisors know you can spend hours churning out beautifully formatted spreadsheets that ultimately have no meaning. Maybe in trying to meet a deadline, you dive in without taking time to define clear objectives and then have to backtrack and do rework. Or, you delegate a task to a junior associate or paraplanner but fail to communicate your request fully or effectively and then find your workflow disrupted by questions, so you get frustrated and just do it yourself.

Most advisors I’ve worked with who want to improve their time management have tried to adopt better habits. They’ve read bestsellers, such as the now-popular Atomic Habits and books by David Allen, and they listen to motivational podcasts. And still, they struggle.

Sustainable Strategies for Long-Term Success

Based on my theoretical training and years of experience as an executive coach and consultant for financial advisories, I have found four critical building blocks that yield dramatic improvements in my clients’ capacity to manage time:

1. Develop a personalized strategy based on your unique thinking style, personality preferences, and circumstances.

Are you deadline-driven or an early starter? Do you need specific steps before you can get going, or do you first need to see the big picture? In my work, I use a set of behavioral inventories to quickly identify an advisor’s strengths and areas for growth. We also reflect on their earlier successes, identifying factors and conditions that typically increase their chances for success. We use that information to inform best practices for future effectiveness.

2. Identify triggers that typically throw you off course and employ preventive tactics.

Common triggers that limit advisor success include lack of adequate administrative or paraplanner support, not taking time to “point your ladder against the right wall” (i.e., taking actions without aligning to a purpose), unanticipated events, distractibility, fear of failure, and avoidance. To identify your triggers, reflect on a critical goal or goals—past and/or present—that you’ve wanted to complete but that keeps rolling over into the future. Next, do a debrief on what got in the way. Focus on the factors these experiences have in common. Then, use this information to protect your goals from future derailments.

3. Compartmentalize your schedule to minimize multitasking and constant focus shifting.

Compartmentalizing involves grouping like tasks into time blocks. Here, advisors can take a lesson from manufacturing firms where similar production runs are batched to avoid the extra costs—labor and time—of retooling the line. The human brain also works best by focusing on similar tasks in a serial manner rather than falling into firefighter mode, shifting focus from one small fire to another, ruled by the tyranny of the urgent. Most advisors I have worked with favor working in their business (serving clients, managing portfolios, etc.) over working on their business (business development, training, team-building, etc.), so they seek help to be more accountable to the latter. Balancing the two is critical for long-term profitability. I have seen advisors achieve dramatic improvements in productivity and satisfaction by implementing the following personalized time management strategies:

First, we identify:

• Their most productive times for focus-intensive tasks and tasks they avoid
• High- and low-demand client appointment days and times
• How much time they need to prepare for highly productive meetings
• Times when team members they coordinate with most typically are available
• Times that conflict with their firm’s recurring activities, such as EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) and other meetings

Next, we use those data to compartmentalize their schedule:

• Create time blocks to work on their business, favoring those with the greatest chance for consistency.
• Designate ample client appointment blocks.
• Ask those with authority to add client meetings to their calendars to offer appointment slots only within dedicated time blocks.
• Build in open office hours and other wiggle room to allow for occasional exceptions and disruptions.
• If possible, physically block times in their calendar.

4. Adopt a simple mindfulness practice to help you sustain focus and smoothly course correct when needed.

Toward this end, I teach advisors to use these three quick mindfulness questions (derived from the Baldrige Performance Excellence model) before taking action:

• “So what?” “What does this task have to do with what is most important?”
• “Is this critical right now, soon, later, or ever?”
• “Do I need support from others to achieve this?”

Ideally, these practices should be coordinated firmwide; however, if you feel a sense of urgency and others do not, focus on your own growth first.

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Jody Jacobson, Ph.D., is an executive coach and consultant working exclusively with advisors and advisory owners navigating transitions. If you’d like a complimentary 30-minute call with Jody to discuss your big goals, use this link to schedule a time: https://calendly.com/jzj/talk-with-jody.

image credit: istock.com/oonal