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ThinkAdvisor

Practice Management > Building Your Business

Busy? Yes! But Are You Good Busy?

By Greg Opitz

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I’ve noticed something lately about the advisors with whom I coach. They no longer tell me they are busy. Why? They have become all too familiar with my response to that statement. “Are you good busy or bad busy?”

We are all busy! But to ensure we are consistently good busy, review two necessities – your productivity and your job description.

An Easy Way to Review Your Productivity

At Peak Advisor Alliance we utilize a helpful tool called the Productivity Management System. It’s a spreadsheet that awards points for certain activities. It’s a nice, linear approach to accomplishing what you have pre-determined to be your most important activities each day. You get points for a prospect meeting, a client meeting and even activities like working out. (Yes, working out is good busy. Spending time reducing stress and improving health leads to increased productivity.)   

When the bad busy activities start to invade your time, no points are awarded. For example, I think we can all agree our addiction to email (and for many advisors LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter as well) has reached epidemic proportions.

Now, social media and email are all great tools to achieve important business functions, but if used incorrectly they can draw down precious time in your work day. Therefore, you don’t get points for email and social media unless you’ve blocked specific time for these activities and kept to that time frame. 

Click here and enter the code “productivity” to download our Productivity Management Spreadsheet for yourself and track your daily activity. 

Total your points at the end of the day to quickly assess if your day was a productive one. If not, the tool will help you identify how your day got off track and what needs to be delegated in order to get back on track.

Take a Second Look at Your Job Description

Review your job description and ask yourself, “Are my day’s activities spent fulfilling the responsibilities listed on my job description?” If the answer is “no,” then you have a problem. 

An advisor once commented to me, “If my job description isn’t changing every three to five years then I’m not growing fast enough. I’m not doing the right stuff.” He makes an excellent point.

From a long-term perspective, if your productivity management system is working effectively then your list of “good busy” tasks should be getting smaller every year. In fact, after over 30 years in the business, Ron Carson’s job description now consists of three items: 

1. Provide strategic vision for the firm

2. Generate new business

3. Work with an ideal group of clients. 

Therefore, his list of “good busy” action items each day predominantly centers on these three roles. If his activities aren’t moving the needle in some way regarding one of these roles, they fall into the “bad busy” category and are swiftly delegated to other team members. 

Early in your career your job description will be much broader. You will need to fill many roles and execute a wide variety of “good busy” activities to keep the business going. However, as your business grows and your firm gets bigger, your “good busy” activities should narrow with a smaller number of very important items only you can do.   

To sum it up:  the more you accomplish, the bigger you get.

The bigger you get the shorter and more visionary your job description becomes.

Make a habit of incorporating these two simple actions in your daily life and see how your productivity and role have a more meaningful impact on your firm’s growth. 

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