Monday Morning Jumpstart with Dan Richards

10 minutes to drive your week

Topic for February 1, 2010: Seven ways to gain control of your day

Listen to the interview

Here are seven tips from U.S. consultant Steve Sanduski on making your day more productive.

Tip one: Stop complaining about not having enough time

We all have the same number of hours to work with – what seperates top advisors is what they do with those hours.

Tip Two: Focus on outcomes you love

You need to love the outcome of what you're attempting to do more than the pain that you might have to go through to actually accomplish it.

For example, take time blocking. You all know that it's effective and can help you be more productive. But if you're not doing it, maybe you're saying, "Well, I just like to have the flexibility in my schedule so that if I need to go have lunch with a buddy, I can do that. I don't have to stick to this fixed time-block schedule that I have in front of me." So what are you really saying? Maybe you value flexibility more than the higher productivity from sticking to a structured schedule.

Tip Three: Know what you value

Before you can be productive, you must discover what you value.

Once you figure out what you value you can align all your activities on a daily basis, weekly basis, and monthly basis around the objective of accomplishing what that one thing is.

Tip four: Spend time on the right activities

Steve's firm did a survey of financial advisors some time ago. They asked them to track their time over a one- or two-week period, to see if there was any difference between how $100,000 producers spent their time and how producers doing a million dollars or more spent their time.

They found ten activities accounted for about 75% of the typical day or week of a million-dollar-plus producer:

• Reviewing client goals and objectives
• Managing assets and research
• Communicating with A+ clients
• Staying physically fit
• Cultivating A+ referrals
• Deepening A+ and A relationships
• Developing centers of influence
• Delivering A+ and A client solutions
• Meeting with staff

These advisors didn't spend time doing things that could easily be handled by someone else in the office or even outsourced, not did they spend time working with B- and C-level clients or B- and C-level prospects.

Instead, they had an associate wealth advisor in the office who was able to work with these less-complicated accounts. These top producers were very focused on A+ prospects and A or A+ clients.

Tip five: Reduce stress and workload.

Successful advisors reduce stress in their lives by focusing on the most important activities that drive their business. Most advisors have to do lists … what many need are do not do lists that help say no to the things that aren't important and yes to things that are important.

Part of reducing stress also involves not taking on more than you can handle. So if you add something to your life (a new routine or opportunity), you're going to have to drop something else out of your life. We're down to the final two principles. What's number six?

Tip six: Don't try to multitask.

To achieve maximum productivity, you need to focus on one task at a time and give yourself a time limit to accomplish it. It's so easy to get distracted, but you get the best result when you're focused. Time blocking is a powerful way to focus our attention on one thing at a time, whether that's checking e-mail, returning calls, making outbound calls, or visiting with clients. We all love to multitask, but to operate at peak productivity we need to stop multitasking and start unitasking. When you're working on something important, you've got to focus on that

Tip seven: Identify six key things you need to do every day.

Each day before you leave the office, write down six things that you have to accomplish the next day.

At the very bottom of the page write, "The Vital One." This is a big thing you have to do this week, perhaps putting together a proposal for a prospect, or planning a prospecting event.

When you get into the office the next day, start on your No. 1 item, and finish it or get as far as you can go, scratch through it, and move on.

Finally, remember this quote from Peter Drucker: "Efficiency is doing things right, while effectiveness is doing the right things."