Latest / The Efficient Advisor: Tactical Business Advice for Financial Planners / 178: Michael Kitces on Time Management & Building Your Model Week

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178: Michael Kitces on Time Management & Building Your Model Week · The Efficient Advisor: Tactical Business Advice for Financial Planners

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: The man, the myth, the legend.
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: I've got one of my favorite people, michael Kitzis, on to talk about one of my favorite topics time management and getting it all done in less time.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: After I appeared on his show, which was episode number 302, michael and I realized we are both model week time management productivity nerds and we've chatted a bunch about this topic since then.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: So I thought it might be fun to have him on the show and to talk about how he organizes his time in a way that he can manage multiple large companies and really not have it trickle over into his home life or his weekends.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: It's impressive stuff.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: So if you're looking for balance between being a boss, being an advisor, doing planning, doing the creative work and wearing all the seven zillion hats that I know you wear, then you'll want to dig into this episode.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Oh, and the other thing that I found out is Michael, like myself, struggles with ADD.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: So here we go zero excuses, all right, okay.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: So we've talked about this several times.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: We have a mutual shared passion over all things.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: Time management.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: Model week, like staying.
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: I was saying I do organize.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: Oh man, someday we're just going to have to get together and show each other planners and calendars and just drool over whatever color coordination you have.
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: Oh yes, there are colors, there are colors.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: There are so many colors and it makes my world really happy when things are color coordinated so well.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: So I'm glad you're here, and one of the things that we talk about a lot, kind of ad nauseam, it feels like is this idea of scaling yourself first before you even think about expanding your team and adding other people.
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: Like, are you really genuinely maximizing yourself, maximizing your time?
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: Now you are kind of the granddaddy of time management, it feels like to me, with running three businesses.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: So something I would love to dive into today.
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: I know my listeners always pay extra special attention to time management related episodes and I think they'll be really kind of curious to hear how you manage and how you kind of organize your calendar, maybe at like a macro level, maybe at like kind of a medium level and sort of down to like a micro level, that you're managing what three businesses now.
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: More than that, depending on how you measure them 37, 37 businesses.
• 2:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's about sticks.
• 2:34
  Speaker 2: I've got sub material roll in.
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, okay.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: So how do you keep it all organized?
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: How do you make sure that you're not wasting a lot of time like mental shifting from one business to another?
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: So, as someone who has always owned multiple businesses, something I get really I have to be really really intentional about is how do I work in this little zone over here and then shifting to now?
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: Okay, all of a sudden, I'm dealing with property managers and rental properties and something completely different.
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: So share with me how you like.
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: So we're in January when we're recording this, right.
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: So how do you sit down and look at your year and just where do you even start from an organizational perspective?
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: Well, so I'll be asked to answer.
• 3:16
  Speaker 2: So I guess the one question I wanna put to you for context, like do you want what it looks like now or do you want what it looked like in the past?
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: Cause it's all like like where it is now, as itself kind of a product of evolution over time.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: So do you want where we are?
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: Now or where it started, or why don't you share with me where you're at now and sort of how you ended up there?
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: Why is it like that now, and maybe what were some of the things that tripped you up or some of the mistakes that you made that sort of led you to that current model that you're in?
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: So the current model that I'm in, I live a version of, I guess, what I call an ideal week calendar.
• 3:57
  Speaker 2: I think you have a similar-.
• 4:00
  Speaker 2: Model week Model week yes label for it, Although in truth I really I actually modeled a little bit more as a model month calendar where there's some consistent dynamics to the week but some things that kind of rotate on certain days of the week.
• 4:20
  Speaker 2: So in pure sense, mondays for me as a team is a team day.
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: So all of my team related meetings are stacked on Monday.
• 4:31
  Speaker 2: First thing Monday morning is a executive team meeting with my managing director on the Kitsis platform and then a meeting with the entire management team.
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: Those are just standing meetings Monday mornings.
• 4:48
  Speaker 2: I always know what's going on Monday morning.
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: Monday afternoon is then just continuing team meetings.
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: In practice for me that's a little bit of rotating.
• 4:58
  Speaker 2: There's some standing meetings around, like our editorial team on the Kitsiscom platform that has some standing time.
• 5:06
  Speaker 2: I've got a standing one-on-one with Alan Moore, who's my co-founder with XYPli Network and AdvicePay.
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: So we're catching up on those businesses with the standing Monday meeting.
• 5:17
  Speaker 2: There's a couple of meetings that rotate slightly.
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: I've got a roadmap meeting for different departments that I kind of rotate through the 2PM slot.
• 5:28
  Speaker 2: So the first Monday it's the engagement team, the second Monday it's the platform team and so on.
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: But that basically means Monday is just stacked with work on the business meetings.
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: There's no creative work getting done.
• 5:45
  Speaker 2: I'm not getting any of my task list done.
• 5:48
  Speaker 2: I'm usually not even that responsive to email or I use Slack for a lot of the businesses Slack.
• 5:53
  Speaker 2: Everyone just kind of knows Like I am in meetings on Monday, but what that means is it's actually it's a pretty long stacked day of Monday meetings, but it gets the bulk of my meetings to the week out of the way on Monday because they're just stacked straight through and there really is kind of a mental piece of yeah, I don't feel I'm a pretty kind of tenacity, check my stuff off, get things done.
• 6:22
  Speaker 2: Person.
• 6:22
  Speaker 2: I am very comfortable that nothing gets checked off on Monday.
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: I've like given myself mental permission.
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: You ain't getting no task things done on Monday.
• 6:30
  Speaker 2: This is the meeting day.
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: Just get through the meetings, be present for the meetings, knock through all the meetings and I can then go one to the next and the brain gets into habits and comfort zones around that.
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I was gonna say did it take you some time to get to that place where you were just like accepting of the fact that this is not gonna be a check the box day at all?
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the stacking the meetings wasn't tough for me to get through.
• 6:55
  Speaker 2: Just I may.
• 6:56
  Speaker 2: I've always kind of been a.
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: If this is the thing I'm working on, I'm just gonna grind on the thing.
• 7:01
  Speaker 2: If this thing I'm working on, I'm gonna grind on the thing.
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: So like you know, burst of time towards a thing is not new for me.
• 7:08
  Speaker 2: But yes, it took a while just to get comfortable with no, if that's what I'm doing that day, like there really ain't much else getting done, and then that's okay, because you know this is not.
• 7:23
  Speaker 2: Is I suppose it seems like we're not performing brain surgery here, like, yes, the work we do is very important, but like no one's going to die if it takes an hour or two to respond to a message.
• 7:35
  Speaker 2: No one's life is actually on the line here.
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: Like let's just be clear about the relative stakes.
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: So funny you said it.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: I always say that I'm like that was.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: The best part about running a financial planning business is like no one's going to die on the table if we don't get that form to them or something doesn't happen by you know 2pm today.
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: So then Tuesdays for me Tuesday mornings is typically an extension of some team time and team meetings.
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: So we're EOS Entrepreneurially Operating System kind of adherence as well.
• 8:13
  Speaker 2: So Tuesday mornings I might have some team meetings to work on some rock initiatives for the quarter.
• 8:20
  Speaker 2: Our monthly all hands meeting falls on a Tuesday morning once a month.
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: We do some internal monthly data meetings with the business one Tuesday morning a month.
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: So Tuesday mornings are kind of an extension of some team time.
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: Then Tuesday afternoons and straight into Wednesdays and Thursdays is just focus time to get stuff done.
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: So that might be a day stacked with external meetings of client work or other things we're doing.
• 8:55
  Speaker 2: I don't do a lot of direct client work these days but external podcasts, external speaking, external meetings with business partners we're doing work with Just that's all external serve, the people we serve, grow the business time in its purest sense.
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: Then Friday mornings well, fridays tends to be the wrap up day of let's make sure all the taskie stuff did get done for the week.
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: So in practice, for me Friday mornings is usually some work supporting our editorial team and just making sure they've got all the info and feedback they need on stuff we're editing or topics we're pitching for kids is dot com platform and Friday afternoon is a lot of my okay, I got there are there are tasks for the week that have not been checked yet.
• 9:43
  Speaker 2: I need to check them so that I can go into my weekend with with some clear, clear time and space, both because I'm a little bit of a I need to check the things off to feel like they're done kind of wired person and also that I've really found if I don't have some clear space on Friday afternoon to get through that stuff, it will now get me through the weekends that they're there, particularly because I can't work on them at the beginning of next week because Monday is stacked meeting day and Tuesday morning usually has some as well, and I'm not going to let things slide until next Tuesday or Wednesday because while we're not no one's going to die on the table.
• 10:21
  Speaker 2: I'm not leaving things many, many business days.
• 10:22
  Speaker 2: That's not good for the, for the team.
• 10:24
  Speaker 2: So I actually found, like my, my weekend health got better when I started creating blocks of a few hours on Friday afternoons to make sure I could get through all the businessy task things for the week that might still be bouncing around the business, so that I can close my week at the end of Friday and know that stuff is done and not have it spill over into the weekend, because otherwise it's going to spread out too long next week.
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: So it sounds like you have your day organized sort of by the, the type of task or the type of work, not necessarily about like the business line that you're working in.
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: Is that fair?
• 11:01
  Speaker 2: Yes, that's a very good way to frame it.
• 11:03
  Speaker 2: Now, even even within some of the business line work, I will try to group them a little bit.
• 11:09
  Speaker 2: My XY planning now work and advice pay team calls that I sit in on are kind of cluster together in mid Monday afternoon so at least like I'm kind of externally oriented for a few hours before I've got a few more of the internal team meetings.
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: But yes, from I have found from a productivity end, it's much more about the nature of the work.
• 11:32
  Speaker 2: Right, if this needs to be a creative day like, this is a writing day for me.
• 11:35
  Speaker 2: I just have to be able to be, like, fully present with my sheet of blank paper to write and create whatever I'm going to create.
• 11:43
  Speaker 2: Because you know, particularly in the world of writing like, if you give yourself any excuse to be distracted from writing and not putting words on the page, you're going to not put words on the page.
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: So I have to not have anything else stacked up.
• 11:56
  Speaker 2: If this is a speaking day where I'm going to be out at a conference, in an industry event, I want to be present at the event.
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: So if I've got a whole bunch of other things lingering that I know I need to be doing in the background, then I can't be present for the event or the things that I'm supposed to be present for, because I'm thinking about all the other stuff that I was supposed to be doing off on the off the sidelines and then I end up distracted and so I guess it's sort of twofold.
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: There is a get clear on what the nature of the activity is for the day.
• 12:28
  Speaker 2: I mean, going a ways back, it was internal team meetings and then client meeting days or business development days still very much the same functional groupings, because I found, the one hand, just you can mentally get into the zone a little bit more when that's your day, right.
• 12:45
  Speaker 2: If it's client meeting day, like, I just know it's meeting, meeting, meeting meeting day and the only thing I do in between meetings is close out the last one and prep for the next one.
• 12:54
  Speaker 2: I'm not doing anything else on meeting, client meeting day, right.
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: If it's biz dev day, I'm just focused on business development, because that's another good one that if you give me any excuse to do anything else, I will procrastinate on business development because I don't really like sales and business development.
• 13:09
  Speaker 2: So you know, clear the day, so I don't have any, any proverbial excuses.
• 13:13
  Speaker 2: So I find there's sort of twofold it gets you into the mental zone of the thing and it gives you, it gives your brain, permission to say this is the thing of the day, so it's okay to not do the other things of the day that you're otherwise gonna try to do, either to procrastinate or because maybe you're neurotic, like I am, and you see tasks that someone wants to start checking them off.
• 13:40
  Speaker 2: It creates the mental space to do that and stay focused on what the activity is that it needs to be.
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: Okay, I love that.
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: And so then you mentioned a model month.
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: So we talked about your kind of, your micro week.
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: So are your weeks similar in structure week over week?
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: Tell me a little bit about how you're on that point.
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so weeks are structurally similar throughout the month but they'll rotate through a little because, again, I have lots of different activities.
• 14:08
  Speaker 2: So Wednesdays tend to be days that are clear for creative work.
• 14:14
  Speaker 2: But one Wednesday a month that's writing an article for our site.
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: One Wednesday a month that's doing a big old stack of podcast recordings where we record our advisor success podcast.
• 14:27
  Speaker 2: So like that's a day a month.
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: So, yes, like Wednesday might be a clear space, creative workday.
• 14:34
  Speaker 2: In fact, for our whole company Wednesdays are no meeting Wednesdays, no internal meeting Wednesdays, so everybody in the organization gets to have some clear space to work in the middle of the week.
• 14:48
  Speaker 2: But the particular thing may vary because I've got too many different hats that I wear to just have it like always be one thing.
• 14:57
  Speaker 2: And in the old, in the olden days, air quotes, as it were.
• 15:01
  Speaker 2: For me, like Wednesday would just always be client meeting, wednesday's, always client meeting day.
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: Tuesday, wednesday, thursday would always be, would always be client meetings or financial planning, client work.
• 15:13
  Speaker 2: Now it's a little bit more varied because I've got more businesses, but it still follows the same.
• 15:20
  Speaker 2: Businesses have functional themes and that's because the predecessor version of this system, I literally had theme days and called them theme days, like meeting day, client day, writing day, speaking day, because that's when I started doing this seven or eight years ago.
• 15:43
  Speaker 2: Those were kind of the big buckets that I had, and so I would have themes to the days and I would literally make a calendar for the year and color code out what all the days needed to be, because it was the only way I could figure out how to stop over-scheduling myself was, if I just write like, this is how many days I need to do the writing work I do, this is how many days I need to do the client work I need to do.
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: This is how many days I need to do the speaking work I need to do.
• 16:08
  Speaker 2: The first time I did that in trying to plan out my calendar, because I was feeling like I was drowning a little.
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: It added up to something like 283 days and 52 weeks in a year, five working days a week.
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: There's only 260 working days without holidays and it added up to more than 280.
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: I was like, well, this would be why I feel like I'm a little drowning and overworked.
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: Like I've actually literally scheduled myself into the weekends because that's the only possible way to just do the body of work that I have scheduled for myself.
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: So the theme days came from that and then, as the business evolved and the needs of the business evolved and what I needed to do with those theme days, I found that they started morphing towards an ideal week structure and then kind of a templated month structure that went along with it.
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: So when you made the shift to kind of these theme days or you clearly were trying to do, I mean, I have never met another entrepreneur right that bites off more than they can chew and tries to do four years of working, work that's so uncommon for entrepreneurs.
• 17:14
  Speaker 2: That's so uncommon, that was weird, how strange, you'll figure.
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: Did you struggle?
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: And maybe what was kind of your antidote for wanting to be flexible and like, oh, somebody needs me to speak, but it's gonna be on this day, or gosh, I'm not in the mood to do creative work on this day and somebody really needs me on a Wednesday, but that's supposed to be writing day.
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: How rigid are you, were you?
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: What did that look like?
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: Getting to that rigidity of sticking to what you said you were gonna do on the day you said you were gonna do it?
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: So when I first implemented the theme days, they were extremely rigid.
• 17:53
  Speaker 2: And they were extremely rigid because it was already drowning.
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: You know, it's kind of like in general I don't go swimming with a life preserver, but if I'm drowning I'm going to cling to it very rigidly at that point and that's basically what it felt like.
• 18:12
  Speaker 2: At that time I was already past the point of over-scheduling.
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: I mean, I literally went into the math, made the calendar.
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: It adds up two more days than there are working days in the year.
• 18:25
  Speaker 2: No wonder it doesn't feel very good right now.
• 18:27
  Speaker 2: This is like circa 2016.
• 18:30
  Speaker 2: I think end of 2016,.
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: End of 2017, I think, was when I made the first theme day calendar and, like, did the math and it added up to more days than there were.
• 18:40
  Speaker 2: So at that point, really, what had happened was I was already so far down the road of not being good at saying no to things and saying yes to opportunity and walk through doors that open and all those lovely things we tell ourselves in the entrepreneurial context and like it was growing very well, like business was good, revenue and income were very good, but hours were not.
• 19:01
  Speaker 2: So I was already at that point and basically saying, like, how do I claw this back and say no and start saying no?
• 19:10
  Speaker 2: And so, in essence, really like the themes calendar became very effective for getting comfortable actually starting to say no at that point.
• 19:18
  Speaker 2: So it's like there are literally already more scheduled days than there are days.
• 19:24
  Speaker 2: There is nowhere to put the thing you're asking.
• 19:29
  Speaker 2: They're just literally no.
• 19:31
  Speaker 2: Like I have cause you know, I'm numbers and spreadsheets Like there's a spreadsheet, it's math.
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: There's literally no place to put this opportunity.
• 19:41
  Speaker 2: I have no choice but to say no because I've already bitten off as many things as I can and really to me, like the biggest first thing that came from creating this kind of structure and I do now wish I had done it a little bit earlier.
• 19:58
  Speaker 2: I found it out of desperation when I was looking for solutions to do with what I was doing.
• 20:03
  Speaker 2: I do wish I had been doing it a little bit earlier because if I had done it earlier I would have realized before I actually over scheduled myself that it was adding up too much, like maybe I would have figured this out when I was at 230 days and might still want to take a vacation at some point, not when I was at literally 280 scheduled days.
• 20:24
  Speaker 2: Negative vacation, negative weekends, oh, and that's accounting for literally no space for like life to happen or things to happen Like that was actual already commitments billing like 280 days of working days of the year.
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well and so okay.
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: So a couple of questions.
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: So where in your calendar?
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: Cause you kind of hit that for me.
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: So a couple of questions are like people will always ask me like okay, well, you had all of this structure and at first I am the opposite of you.
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: So, add, like the thought of structure just makes me want to vomit.
• 21:01
  Speaker 2: Oh, I'm severe diagnosed ADHD.
• 21:03
  Speaker 2: Okay, good, that's why I didn't do this for the first 15 years of my career.
• 21:08
  Speaker 2: I had to punish myself in the ways that we tend to do in an ADHD environment.
• 21:13
  Speaker 2: So, yes, like this again.
• 21:16
  Speaker 2: Do you feel like the life preserver kind of analogy is a pretty good one.
• 21:22
  Speaker 2: Like yes, I clung to it when I had to, but like no, I wasn't touching structure in the 10 foot pole for most of my working days.
• 21:31
  Speaker 2: I mean, like school was awful for me.
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: Yes, okay, I could not live in the structure.
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, and it's interesting because you know people always go gosh.
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: That sounds really miserable and like I remember being.
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: I started my business when I was 23 and I was an entrepreneur and I could sleep till noon and work till midnight and do whatever I wanted and I thought that was freedom, right.
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: And it wasn't really actually until I established all of this structure in a model week and giving myself time blocks and learning how to batch and mega batch, that I actually had freedom because of the structure.
• 22:04
  Speaker 2: Yes, I would say something very, very similar the the structure, is what allows me to live what's still a fairly scattered ADHD world and puts my time in the sandboxes, so I don't break myself.
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: So what do you-?
• 22:26
  Speaker 2: Wednesday's the creative day, so I can do whatever like crazy thing.
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: My brain's gonna go to that day and I know it's okay to do that because I've already created the space and set the themes for the week and the month to know that it's okay to do that and be my crazy self on Wednesday and not have to wonder if I'm gonna get behind.
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: But I also know, like Wednesday, because you got other things to do this week if you're gonna get all your things done and not let your team down.
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: So, like Wednesday, like you sit down, you're like, okay, I have all of these different creative tasks.
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: Now that I know that you have the same attention struggles that I have, what do you do when you're not in the mood to do that creative work?
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: Or do you just go Do you give yourself like latitude, or are you booked out where you're like I do this from 9 to 10 and I do this from 10 to 11?
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: Or do you say here's all the creative crap I have to get done today and my brain feels like doing this first.
• 23:26
  Speaker 2: So I'd answer in two ways and in general, if it's a day that's supposed to be more creative space, I do not schedule it heavily beyond the day is created.
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: In fact it's like it's a non-meeting day.
• 23:42
  Speaker 2: There's a fantastic article out there from Paul Graham who I think is like a VC investor guru guy that he wrote years ago.
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: It's called Makers Schedules and Manager Schedules.
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: Okay, I will find it and I will link it.
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: And the context to it was people who make things and kind of live in creative space need big blocks of open on structure time to do their things.
• 24:18
  Speaker 2: So if you know he's from the technology world, it's like if coders are going to code, you just have to let them hang out with their computer for like 10 hours a day and don't bother them.
• 24:28
  Speaker 2: If you schedule 30 minutes with them, you're going to blow up most of their day because you're going to pull them out of their creative space and then it takes a while to get back into it again with the task switching.
• 24:38
  Speaker 2: So it gets really messy with developers.
• 24:41
  Speaker 2: Like one 30 minute day can blow up their day.
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: You got to let them be completely clear.
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: Managers basically do meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting.
• 24:48
  Speaker 2: That's like that's how manager schedule works.
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: You've got all the different people you got to be with to have all the different stakeholder meetings.
• 24:54
  Speaker 2: So the context of the article was managers need to be really careful to recognize that a manager schedule is very different than a maker schedule.
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: So be careful not to impose your manager schedule on a creative or you're going to blow up the creative trying to be the manager because your calendars work very differently.
• 25:14
  Speaker 2: I kind of feel like I live a portion of each because I have creative space and a large team that I have management responsibilities for.
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: So I do kind of a similar thing.
• 25:21
  Speaker 2: Mondays are a manager day for me and it is me, me, me, me, me, me.
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: Meeting Wednesday might be a creative day.
• 25:28
  Speaker 2: If it's a creative day, it literally there's one thing on my calendar and it says like writing day or podcast day or like whatever the thing might be, and it's literally just like one eight or nine hour block that just says that notched for the full day, there's no, there's no increments to it, because maybe it's a sort of similar for the 80th.
• 25:51
  Speaker 2: You've found I'm like I can, I can stack meetings because there's a thing to do and an objective to accomplish for each meeting.
• 25:59
  Speaker 2: I can't, I can't, I can't time structure creative work that way.
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: Now, the the one asterisk I will give to it, because I'm also still prone to wander in ways that are not necessarily good, to wander when there was actually some work to get done for the day.
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: If I have a creative day, there is still a theme to it and I still actually lean very heavily into the themes.
• 26:24
  Speaker 2: It's an external meetings day, it's a business development day, it's a speaking day, it's a writing day, it's a podcasting day, it's a business strategy, business planning day.
• 26:35
  Speaker 2: I've one of those at least a quarter that I put on the calendar, so I will still give it a theme so that I get very clear on what do I actually need to get done by the end of the day to have accomplished what needs to be done for this day?
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: Okay, I love it.
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: First draft has to be done.
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: Three podcasts have to be recorded.
• 26:55
  Speaker 2: I need some draft of the orderly plan that's in a good enough state that I can show it to my managing director and she will know what the heck I'm talking about because it's out of my head.
• 27:07
  Speaker 2: So I will go in with a clear theme and whatever the milestone is I have to get to at the end of the day, and just having lived my career long enough, I have some sense as to like what a reasonable milestone is to set for myself.
• 27:23
  Speaker 2: That is not ridiculously unrealistic, because I did that to myself early on.
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: So I don't go in blind and I don't open the door to myself to switch around on a whole bunch of different stuff.
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 27:40
  Speaker 2: Because if I open that door then You'll walk right through it and off we go.
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: So how do you manage white space or just having margin?
• 27:50
  Speaker 2: Uh Well, in like the truest irony of the of the ADHD context, I schedule it Good.
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I will track the amount of what I essentially call flex time, which is unscheduled time, on my calendar.
• 28:13
  Speaker 2: Okay, that might be to like catch up on some miscellaneous task work, maybe that's grab a meeting with someone.
• 28:20
  Speaker 2: Maybe that's just because I need to decompress a little bit and I need and I'm pretty rigorous about scheduling it, like everything, in part because there's a lot of competing demands on my calendar, just like I have to schedule things or stuff starts clashing.
• 28:37
  Speaker 2: I have found like I need a certain amount of basically scheduled flex time, scheduled white space on my calendar every week, or it just starts feeling a little too overwhelming, a little too drowny.
• 28:51
  Speaker 2: I just literally can't like find the mental, like breathing space I need for my brain to do the creativity things that it's going to do.
• 28:59
  Speaker 2: So, uh, I will.
• 29:02
  Speaker 2: I set goals of how much flex time I want to have week to week.
• 29:06
  Speaker 2: Um, weeks vary, so it tried to at least average out over the span of the month, but I will actually set time towards that and so I go through.
• 29:16
  Speaker 2: The whole week of the whole month is like, wow, literally every minute of my calendar was scheduled Like there was no flex time, breathing time.
• 29:22
  Speaker 2: That that's not good.
• 29:24
  Speaker 2: That doesn't work for me.
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: That's not, and just it doesn't feel good.
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, so, okay.
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: So if you were talking to an advisor who was like yeah, I'm kind of a hot mess, I'm in that stage where I'm drowning, I'm like what would be kind of those like one or two fundamental things, like starting off places like hey, here's how you start organizing or structuring a calendar, what would be kind of like those basic, bare minimums that you would recommend?
• 29:50
  Speaker 2: To me, the the most straightforward starting point is some core ideal week structure that's basically Mondays or team in prep, tuesday, wednesday, thursdays or clients Fridays is your weekly wrap up and putting some, some structure like that to your week.
• 30:13
  Speaker 2: It lets you go into client meetings more prepped than purely reactive because you've actually got like Monday to set things up.
• 30:19
  Speaker 2: It tends to cut down on how much stuff doesn't get followed up on because you've got Fridays to figure out all the follow up tasks and the sign the things to the team and the follow up emails and the client notes and whatever, whatever things you do in the in the context of your firm.
• 30:33
  Speaker 2: It lets you get into the mental zone that client meeting days are client meeting days.
• 30:38
  Speaker 2: You don't have to do prep things because you did it on Monday and you don't have to figure all the follow up things because you got space for it on Friday.
• 30:47
  Speaker 2: You can just be present for your client meetings and do your client meetings.
• 30:52
  Speaker 2: Virtually all of us that contemplate something like that then go through a round of but I've got clients that only want to meet with me on certain days and aren't going to accept this.
• 31:01
  Speaker 2: Your clients accept it.
• 31:02
  Speaker 2: They do.
• 31:04
  Speaker 2: We convince ourselves that they're not, because we want to tell the stories.
• 31:08
  Speaker 2: 98% of your clients will, and the one truly unbelievably weirdly persnickety client.
• 31:14
  Speaker 2: You can have an exception and meet with them two meetings a year on Monday afternoon Fine, but the reality is like you're a professional, they're engaging a professional.
• 31:24
  Speaker 2: If I need to see my doctor and my doctor says he doesn't have availability on Mondays, I don't go.
• 31:29
  Speaker 2: While I'm firing you after working with you for 17 years, I ask him when his next available appointment is and I go see him.
• 31:35
  Speaker 2: It's not a big deal.
• 31:36
  Speaker 2: So whatever times you put out to your clients are the times that they will schedule and they're going to schedule with you If you tell them it's Tuesday, wednesday, thursday.
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: Amen, thank you.
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: I mean, that was one of my biggest fears.
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: With only working a three day a week schedule was like there's no way there's gonna be, like what about that?
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: I mean, and I had one client I can remember in particular who was like I can only ever meet on Fridays and he was this royal pain in the butt for I don't know seven years about this Friday meeting thing and finally, when I was not working Fridays anymore, it turns out he has every other Monday off and I'm like wait, wait, wait back up.
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: You've been telling me for the last, like however many years, that you can only meet Friday mornings.
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: It turns out you have a lot more space in your schedule than you ever.
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: You know, live on.
• 32:25
  Speaker 2: And what it comes down to at some point is like if the client is that much of a pain, like maybe you're not a good client, right, if they can't work with you in the system that makes you able to most effectively serve your clients.
• 32:38
  Speaker 2: Now that's easy to say once your practice gets to a certain point and it's not as big of a deal if you have to move on from a client.
• 32:45
  Speaker 2: That's really hard early on when, like every client's in bit of revenue is scarce and valuable, so like easier to say at some stages of the business progression than others.
• 32:55
  Speaker 2: But I find for almost all advisors there is some point where that switch flips.
• 33:01
  Speaker 2: It's like, yeah, you know what, if I'm gonna set my ideal structure and like one or two of my 117 clients leaves, then I guess one or two of my 117 clients leaves.
• 33:11
  Speaker 2: A, I'm still gonna be a much better mental place when I actually get better control of my calendar and my time and feel better about it.
• 33:19
  Speaker 2: And B, I find almost always the clients that are that pain in the backside about the scheduling are usually that pain in the backside about a lot of other things as well, and very rarely do we actually shed a tear when it turns out that that's the client we're letting go of.
• 33:35
  Speaker 2: I mean, I find for most of us it's just you spend so many years trying so hard to get clients in revenue.
• 33:42
  Speaker 2: It's really hard to change the mental switch of like it's actually okay to tell one of them to leave after you spend so many years trying to get all of them in the first place.
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: For sure.
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's funny because no advisor that finally does that like two years later, is like gosh.
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: I really miss Betty.
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: I really miss her.
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, never, not once ever.
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: Nope, nope.
• 34:03
  Speaker 2: Well, so before we wrap, up.
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: So where do you like?
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: What kind of calendar?
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: Do you use?
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: A Google calendar?
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: Are you a something techie?
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: Are you more old fashioned?
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: What do you guys use within your business?
• 34:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so I'm a very quintessential Gen Xer Microsoft Outlook and then, supported with the spreadsheet, it all excel.
• 34:24
  Speaker 2: So the core of my calendar is in Outlook and just everything's there.
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: Everything gets scheduled onto the calendar, because I really schedule everything onto the calendar then makes it really easy at the end of the week to go through and add up all the things that were on my calendar and actually track where I spent my time.
• 34:45
  Speaker 2: Now, as team is growing early on that was me tracking my time and making my ideal week.
• 34:50
  Speaker 2: Now I hired an executive assistant and so she goes and does the time tracking.
• 34:55
  Speaker 2: Hiring an executive assistant is a whole other discussion we should probably have in a future episode.
• 35:02
  Speaker 2: I waited too long, everybody waits too long.
• 35:04
  Speaker 2: It's hard to express how much of a game changer it is, but there's a spreadsheet that will then go through and add up every week where did my time actually go?
• 35:17
  Speaker 2: And I put it into a couple of broad categories or like team time, business development time, external businesses, because I've got some related to those, some of the creative time for the writing, speaking stuff that I need to do.
• 35:32
  Speaker 2: So there's about a half a dozen categories and some subcategories, so she will track all of that, and so I've now got running tracking totals over time of where my time goes in average week, where my time goes in average month, so that I can then sit down with intentionality to say, all right, here's really where my time is actually going, is that really the highest and best use of my time and where it should be going, and is that really what moves the business forward?
• 35:59
  Speaker 2: And if not, then what do I need to do or shift or change or delegate or hire or whatever it is to restructure my time to do the things that are our best impact.
• 36:09
  Speaker 2: And I find there's a phenomenon with time tracking that's kind of like budget tracking, spending tracking.
• 36:16
  Speaker 2: We can give clients all sorts of advice about how to spend more responsibly, but it turns out one of the most effective interventions is just get them some kind of spending tracking automation right Mintcom or Monarch or whatever.
• 36:30
  Speaker 2: Put the sign them up and e-money or write capital and just show them where their own money's going, and when they look at where their money's actually going relative to where they wanted their money to be spent, they start changing their behavior all by themselves.
• 36:43
  Speaker 2: So I can talk about where you prospective listener might be better spending your time.
• 36:50
  Speaker 2: But the biggest impact by far is just track it yourself and add it up for a couple of weeks and look at where it actually is and after you're mortified like you will be, like we all are, the first time you do that then decide what you want to start changing.
• 37:09
  Speaker 2: And because most of us are not good at doing that by habit unless you are and you know who you are, but most of us are not I found either you can get one of the time tracking tools that are out there, like Toggle and such some people use and really swear by.
• 37:26
  Speaker 2: Some people will just if you're good at scheduling everything on your calendar, you just have to count your calendar at the end of the week, which gets easier if you're rigorous about using your calendar that way in the first place.
• 37:38
  Speaker 2: Or the third option is just have someone on your admin staff do it for you.
• 37:43
  Speaker 2: I mean, have them track your time and look at your calendar and spend 10 minutes saying like, hey, I know you weren't actually doing nothing for like four hours on Tuesday afternoon.
• 37:52
  Speaker 2: Can you just recall what you were doing so I can get an estimate of where you spent your time.
• 37:58
  Speaker 2: It's really effective when someone else does it for you, because they will kind of kindly call you out on things.
• 38:05
  Speaker 2: Like we can make excuses for ourselves, but someone else independently adding up your time for you just gives you a little bit more objective.
• 38:11
  Speaker 2: Look and just sit down, look at where the time is going and what you'll find is that most of the challenges we have around productivity are really just that we don't spend our time on the highest and best use things that we could have.
• 38:26
  Speaker 2: Like it's not time management and efficiency, it's mostly focus management.
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's an excellent point, kind of that Pareto right.
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: Like 20% of our actions drive 80% of our results, if we can just like continue to dial in, like what are those action items that actually move the needle in some direction?
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: And, as you're talking about somebody else tracking your time, when iPhones came out with the hey, here's how you're spending your time on your phone thing, it was like no, that can't be right.
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: That's not right.
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: That can't be right.
• 38:57
  Speaker 2: Uh-huh, yeah, yeah.
• 38:58
  Speaker 2: And then you look at it's like it's overing, uh-huh, uh-huh.
• 39:01
  Speaker 2: So then you gotta decide what you wanna do with that and how you're gonna try to change your systems or your team or your behavior or whatever it is to address that.
• 39:09
  Speaker 2: But yes, like if you don't get that moment of truth about where your time is going, you can't possibly do anything about it.
• 39:17
  Speaker 2: And to me, just the good news is, between technology and some level of team if you've got any level of team, you don't have to literally do all of this for you and like manually track your time, which I was never, ever, ever going to do.
• 39:30
  Speaker 2: There are other systems and tech you can put in place to help track it.
• 39:36
  Speaker 2: Like it doesn't have to be perfect down to the minute.
• 39:38
  Speaker 2: You know, get it to roughly the closest hour and then reflect on it you will still be mortified and then figure out some ways to make changes.
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: Awesome.
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: Well, thank you so much for your time.
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: I love jamming on this with people and just kind of figuring out like, well, how do people deal with white space and margin and what is a good weekly flow?
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: And you know, I always tell advisors it takes a lot of iterations of a Model Week or an Ideal Week to get the one that actually works for you.
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I've.
• 40:07
  Speaker 2: I'm seven or eight years into this of refining and iterating it and the truth is like not only am I still refining to figure out what really works for me, but then, as the business grows, the business needs different things from you.
• 40:19
  Speaker 2: So my Ideal Week also looks very different than it used to, because now there's 23 people that work for kidscom and five years ago there were two people that worked for the, for the business.
• 40:29
  Speaker 2: So my time looks really different than it did because my team structure is drastically different than it was.
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that.
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: And so one quick, one quick question before I let you go do your other team members also have their own Ideal Weeks?
• 40:44
  Speaker 2: Lightly.
• 40:45
  Speaker 2: We don't.
• 40:46
  Speaker 2: We don't force it and impose it upon them, but in part, just as a reflection of my Ideal Week structure and and you know what happens, with leadership as a cascade down to the organization, the whole company primarily does meeting Mondays.
• 41:01
  Speaker 2: The whole company has no meeting Wednesdays.
• 41:04
  Speaker 2: That's actually like a set policy no internal meetings and most of the team ends out doing a lot of taskie stuff on Friday, in part cause that's when everybody else is available to work on things jointly to get stuff done and checked off.
• 41:18
  Speaker 2: So, yes, the whole company has some level of cadence around it.
• 41:22
  Speaker 2: We don't fully prescribe it, in part cause different team members have very different natures to their days and the and the work that they need to do, but there is a high level rhythm for the whole company around what that kind of infrastructure is and it's kind of informed by what works for you as big boss, right?
• 41:39
  Speaker 2: Correct.
• 41:39
  Speaker 2: It's just at the end of the day, like if I'm calling the leadership team meetings on Mondays, well I guess what all the leadership team is going to be doing on Mondays.
• 41:46
  Speaker 2: So just that that there is kind of a cascade effect that comes from that.
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: Well, thank you for nerding out on calendar work with me, I appreciate it.
• 41:56
  Speaker 2: My pleasure.
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: And thank you so much for everything that you do in elevating the industry.
• 42:00
  Speaker 2: Absolutely my pleasure.
• 42:01
  Speaker 2: Thank you, Libby.
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: Okay, yay, thank you guys for nerding out with me a little bit on time management with Michael.
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: If you made it this far, I hope you had some takeaways.
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: I know for me personally, I had several things that I kind of resonated with from this conversation.
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: Some of the ones that stuck out to me were really this idea that he was doing it wrong for 15 years and had zero structure for most of his early working days, and I like this as a takeaway because what that means is literally anybody can do it at any point.
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: You are not someone who has to be born into an ideal model week and naturally be inclined to create structure in order to do it successfully.
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: The other thing that stuck out to me was this idea of themes, so I thought it was interesting how he adjusts.
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: You know, the week weeks might be geared towards different businesses, but the themes for each week are the same on a given day.
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: I thought that was a really great idea for those of us running, you know, kind of multiple things at the same time or even thinking through like content creation, and if you have kind of other roles or various roles within your business, perhaps theming your days might be something that is worth giving a shot.
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: I also thought it was interesting that he still tracks on occasion to just make sure he's in alignment, and I loved when he said the biggest problem is not necessarily time management but focus management.
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: And, yes, being able to show up prepared and know what you're gonna work on and having some sort of shutdown and startup routine inside of your business that gives you that ability to not sit down right when you walk in the door and spend 15 minutes figuring out what you're gonna do, but really to sit down and start working on something absolutely right away.
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: I love that.
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: And then you know, of course, narrowing your book down to the best clients.
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: So much easier said than done.
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: And then the final takeaway was that your Model Week informed your team's Model Weeks, and it's important for not just you to have a Model Week but really getting your teammates, your staff, on board with their own versions of Model Weeks.
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: And there's a whole episode that I did on that, episode number 12.
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: I'll link it in the show notes for you.
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: And it's something we spend time on in our group coaching program, because building a Model Week and building a team's Model Week is one of the things that made the biggest difference for me when I went from that working that 70, you know, 80 hours a week down to 24, was getting tighter and tighter and tighter on my Model Week and refining it over and over and over through multiple iterations.
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: So, anyways, hope you guys had a great time listening to this.
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: I would love to catch up with you more over in the Efficient Advisor community on Facebook and over on LinkedIn and I'll see you guys next time.
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: I'll see you guys next time.