As a financial planner, you can have flexible working hours, which means being able to enjoy a great work-life balance and the chance to become your own boss. However, that translates to having to manage your responsibilities well and making sure that you follow your deadlines. At times, this might feel a little overwhelming and you may find that you often lose track of time, especially when you are just starting. To optimise your working hours, you will need to learn to manage your time well. If you are struggling to do this, let us give you some pointers!
Review your schedule
One of the first and most important things to do when thinking about improving your time efficiency is evaluating your current schedule. This is a great way to find out what is making you less efficient and which tasks are more time consuming than you think. You could start this by noting down exactly what you do every day for a week and timing each of the tasks. If you struggle to document, free feel to set timers on your phone every 30 minutes to check-in and ask yourself, what am I doing right now?
Over the week, you may find patterns such as struggling to work through difficult tasks at the end of the day. Or oftentimes for individuals with no set work schedule, you may find that there are no patterns whatsoever—which is the cause of your inefficiency. Now that you know the root cause of your time efficiency issues, you can employ other tactics to tackle them.
Plan ahead
The next step after evaluating your schedule is setting a plan to combat this. Setting a plan every day allows you to have an overview of the tasks you need to do that day, keeping you on track, rather than just doing what you think you need to do. By planning ahead, you will also be able to prioritise your tasks wisely. Plus, since you are aware of how long each task takes from reviewing your schedule, you can arrange them while keeping time in mind. You could also schedule tasks following your body clock; if you feel more creative in the morning, utilise that energy by scheduling tasks that require more creativity in the morning rather than in the afternoon!
Schedule time for certain tasks
As mentioned above, planning and setting a daily schedule is incredibly important because as financial planners, there are myriad different tasks to take on every single day. Although your everyday schedule might jump from one extreme to the other, you will still need to have some constants in your schedule. This includes checking your email or planning your daily schedule as these tasks help you stay on top of your day.
Keep in mind that as a financial planner, you are a business owner too! So it might be beneficial to schedule an evaluation or a personal development session every week. This can track your progress towards your goals and think about how else you can improve yourself personally and professionally.
Set time limits
Setting time limits for your tasks is highly beneficial as it helps you stick to your schedule and limits your procrastination and distractions. Keeping to a set time also gamify the task which makes it more fun to hit the allocated time target! Be sure to keep in mind that you are setting responsible time limits, nothing too long or too short for the task as this may cause more time wasted or lower quality of work. By setting too long of a period, you may fall into the trap of Parkinson’s Law, where you spread your work out to the time allotted, rather than making full use of the time. Setting too short of a time limit may make you rush through your work or overload yourself with too many tasks in a day.
Use time-tracking tools
One of the best ways to employ all the habits mentioned above is to use a time-tracking app. There are plenty on the market that host various functions such as time-tracking, scheduling, note-taking and many more. There are also apps that can be synced through various devices which helps you stay organised and efficient even when you are away from your office. Be sure to experiment to find ones that are suitable for your individual needs and help you manage your time better!
Keep in mind that these habits may be hard to adjust to at the start but with more time and experience, you will be able to manage your time well with ease! If you would like to learn more from seasoned financial planners, reach out to us at KWO! Our financial planners will happily show you the ropes during your first year as a financial planner. If you are passionate about helping others achieve financial health and are always ready to learn and improve, join us today!