[Transcription]
Welcome! Rob Brown of Encore Partners here. Day 20 of the Time Mastery Challenge.
Well, we have one day left after today.
I want to continue to focus today on building your ideal day.
Let’s piece this together.
So far, we have put your clients first, putting time that you’ll spend with your clients on your calendar first is essential.
Second, we talked about planting seeds daily. Make sure you have time to meet with and speak with prospects on a daily basis.
Then we scheduled time for you. How are you going to make sure that you get ready for appointments and do your research if you don’t schedule time for yourself? So, we built that into your ideal week.
And yesterday, I added daily planning…the most important 15 minutes you’ll spend each day. You’ll decide those things that you’ll delete, those things that you’ll delegate, those things you’ll schedule or delay into a future date (perhaps in one of those time slots that you’ve scheduled for yourself), and then we talked about how to manage your to do list to make sure that you accomplish those things you set out to do each day.
Today, I want to fill in some additional essentials and it won’t take very long because we have actually talked about all of the topics that cover these essentials in previous days of the challenge.
Before we dig into those essentials, I want to point out that there’s a lot of time left in your week even though we’ve put in time for client meetings and calls and other activities in which you interact with clients. Even though we put in time for client acquisition, for planting seeds. We’ve put in time for you. We put in time for daily planning. All of that red area that you see on this calendar in front of you right now is time that is empty, that isn’t scheduled yet. It includes some time first thing in the morning, in the middle of the day, towards the end of the day and on Fridays.
We haven’t even touched Fridays.
So, you can get a lot done in just four days a week if you put these pieces together.
Now, I want to talk about filling in the essentials. You might be thinking, “well, what are the essentials, Rob?” To me, the essentials are four things that I stressed are really important that will help you gain productivity and help you gain time back in your day and your weeks…month in and month out.
- It is your morning routine, those things you do before you come into the office.
- That daily stand-up meeting, that meeting that you have with your team around the middle of the day, each day.
- That mid-day break that you take for yourself to make sure that you stay focused or refocus or get re-energized as the case might be.
- And the time that you set aside for returning calls and emails.
All of these essentials, you’ve been working on them, need to be built into your ideal day or into your ideal week.
So, it could look something like this example calendar. This is the routine where each day looks essentially the same. And you can see I’ve added the morning routine, time at home in this example, before 8 o’clock in the morning. Some of you may get started later, some of you may get started earlier. But that morning routine needs to be built into your ideal day.
In this example, I put the stand-up meeting at 11:45 in the morning. Right before you begin your midday break. And maybe that midday break leads into that lunch hour where you take some time to have lunch with clients or prospects or colleagues, but again, that time right now is blank.
And then, I plugged in time for returning calls and emails, setting aside an hour at the end of the day each day. It could be a half an hour in two different time slots.
That’s filling in the essentials.
Putting your morning routine, your daily standup meeting, your midday break, and time to return calls and emails into your ideal day, into your ideal week.
I won’t spend a lot of time on this slide because it’s very similar to the last one, but I want to be consistent because we’ve talked about advisors who may have different ways of approaching their week. Instead of having every day look similar, they like to have each week look similar. So, the same essentials apply, the same amount of extra time that’s still not even filled in applies…you can get a lot done in four days a week if you commit to planning those ideal days, those ideal weeks.
Start with your clients, work in your prospective clients, schedule time for yourself, do the daily planning, and then add the essentials.
That’s how you’re going to make sure that the work that you’ve been doing throughout this challenge lasts for a long time and gets you the results that you’re looking for…getting that time back in your day and being more productive as you’re taking your business to your next level of success.
We’ll talk again tomorrow. Thanks again for listening.