By separating your workday into two-hour segments, Donna McGeorge explains how practitioners can achieve the most out of their daily workflow.

Do you rush through your day from one crisis to another, answering as many emails as you can in the gaps between meetings? When you get home from work, do you spend the evening inhaling coffee to stay awake, catching up on correspondence, preparing presentations for the next day, and getting work done at a time when your body wants to slow down and rest?

Well then, you’re not alone. Many small business owners, including financial planners, are stuck in a vicious cycle that is doing them more harm than good. But the good news is, it’s fixable. All it takes is for you to pay attention to what you do in your day and when. 

By identifying the tasks that require the most energy or intensity from you, and those things that also get you a great return on your investment, you can schedule your day according to the best time to do that work. Here’s how.

Your first two hours

Scheduling high-intensity and high-impact work for the first two hours of your day is the first step to truly managing your time.

The first two hours is when we have the greatest levels of alertness and mental capacity, so we need to make the most of it on the most difficult jobs or the things that require great attention.

As a financial planner, this is the time when you should be doing the following tasks:

• working on client strategies and SOAs;
• putting presentations together for important client meetings;
• solving problems or resolving conflict with others; and
• devising new business policies or procedures.

Contrary to our usual habits, this is not the time to be responding to email. This chews up our most valuable time. By all means, scan emails but save considered responses for later in the day.

Your second two hours

The second two hours of the work day is about identifying where you need to put your attention now, ensuring that the most important things are under control.

Now that the most impactful things are out of the way, you have the space to be reactive and respond to your urgent priorities, or those of your team or practice.

This is when you have space in your diary for other people to book your time.

The tasks you’re responding to might be high-impact for them (and possibly you, too), but are not as high on your priority list, such as:

• attending team meetings;
• conducting client interviews;
• dealing with urgent matters; and
• putting out spot fires.

You may also get away with carry over work from the first two hours and even a quick email scan – go on, you know you want to.

Your third two hours

Now is a great time to do the things you’ve been putting off for ages. By this time, our attention is generally low, but our ability to repeat tasks is high, so think filing, organising or anything that you’d consider ‘boring’ or administrative. Just because things are routine or mundane doesn’t make them unimportant.

It’s a good time to do things like:

• responding to email;
• reading books, articles or correspondence;
• managing meeting requests; and
• filing and shredding.

It is also time to take a break, go for a walk and reset. It might be hard, but you certainly deserve it and it will help set you up for the next two hours of your day.

Your fourth 2 hours

This is usually the time when people have a stress  attack because they realise they have been answering emails all day long and haven’t actually got around to any other work.

Instead, use this time to review what you completed today, and set up for tomorrow, which means planning – and not necessarily doing – what needs to be done.

You might also experience a ‘second wind’, when you feel a little more energetic and have the capacity to push through. If we’re lucky, we end our day with a bang!

So spend these two hours:

• tidying up loose ends;
• scanning your email;
• creating a to-do list for tomorrow; and
• acknowledging where you’re at, so you can sign off the day.

By being aware of our bad habits, and beginning to mitigate them by using this two-hour approach to workflow, you give yourself the best opportunity to maximise not just the first two hours of the day, but all your hours of the work day.

Just try it and see.