If You Want Something Done, Ask a Busy Person

When I work with advisors on consulting projects, I have only one requirement: You have to talk to me over the phone every other week for one hour. But, at the beginning of last fall, I had an unusual thing happen to me. Due to my clients taking vacations and other conflicts, all my consulting phone appointments got packed into one week, which gave me a completely clear calendar the next week. It was so great, I scheduled another two weeks the same way, with one very busy week, then a down week. It worked so well, I’ve been scheduling a busy week, then a down week ever since.

I’d always thought my schedule was full, with preparation for each call, the call itself, and follow-up work afterward. But, after going through that cycle twice, I realized that I could do all my calls in just two weeks a month. They are busy weeks, to be sure, but manageable: Knowing what I need to get done makes me focused, and way more efficient. And I’m motivated by being freed up in the other two weeks to work on long-term projects for clients, do research on the industry, talk to strategic partners for clients, do more writing, make annual or semi-annual client visits, and have more speaking engagements without the nightmare of trying to do client calls from the road.

Pretty cool, huh? Now, here’s the dumb part: I’ve had my clients using the same tight-schedule strategy for many years, with great success. But, like most of us, I always “knew” that my schedule was too tight to tighten any more—until reality slapped me in the face. At the beginning of a new year, if I can offer independent advisors one piece of advice that can change your life, it’s to force yourself to take more time off each week or month. I’ve found that we can almost always do the same amount of work in less time by allowing fewer distractions, and those extra days off you get in return can exponentially raise your quality of life.

In my case, I challenge myself to get my work done so that I can have the next week “off.” To do that, I have to stay focused and not let myself get distracted by requests for time-consuming tasks by people who aren’t my clients (including my husband), by time-eating phone calls, and most importantly, by personal issues—the friend and family drama that can really suck up your time and energy. In fact, I have a theory that for the most part, we create all this drama that seems to fill our lives today—we do it to fill our time because we don’t have enough to do.

By giving ourselves enough to do each day, we reduce the need to get involved in all these outside issues, and consequently start realizing how petty and unimportant most of that stuff is. The small number of outside issues that actually do need to be dealt with can almost always wait until your days off, which provides us with a very useful litmus test: Ask yourself whether a particular issue can wait or does it really require immediate action? Then, the fact that you’re going to have to deal with these issues on your days off provides additional discipline: Do you really want to use your free time to deal with this? You’ll be surprised at your new perspective on most of these distractions: “No, it doesn’t need to be done now, and no, I don’t want to spend my free time doing it either.”

What we’re talking about here is becoming more efficient by allowing yourself less time. In the past three months, I have done some of the greatest work I have ever done, and done it with less time. It works just as well with my advisor clients. For instance, one of my clients was always complaining about how much time he spent at the office and how little time he got to spend at home with his wife and kids. He’d become an independent advisor to have a better lifestyle than his former corporate job, but he didn’t feel it was working out that way.

Having worked with him for years, I knew we had built a very efficient independent practice, with very good people in the right jobs. So, I couldn’t understand why he needed to spend so much time at the office. And I suspected that he, like most folks, was wasting a lot of his time on personal issues, surfing the Internet, gossiping with employees, social media, and simply taking longer than he needed on many projects. The reality of office life is that once you’ve determined you “have” to be there for a specific number of hours, you’ll find things to fill that time. The irony is that inefficient working mentality also leads to procrastination, and you’ll find yourself working even more hours on projects you should easily have been able to get done during the day.