Next-Level Time Management: Create a Master Calendar for Your Practice

Oct 16, 2020 / By Teresa Riccobuono
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Ready to feel more organized and free up some mind space? Download this annual master calendar—it gathers all your action items that occur less frequently than daily or weekly and reminds you when they are due througout the year.

When starting out as a financial advisor, you may be able to fly by the seat of your pants. But as your practice grows, it becomes necessary to systematize your processes.

One key aspect of this is developing a process around what I call “activity management.” I don’t use the term time management, since we cannot truly manage time. The clock keeps ticking and we can’t hit a reset button if we want to start the clock over. What we do have control over is our activity, and what we do with our time.

For those of you who know me well, you know I am a big proponent of adopting a “model week” approach, which we discussed earlier this month. It is sometimes also referred to as a static calendar. In conjunction with the model week, I help advisors and teams develop a master calendar for action items that occur less frequently than daily or weekly.

Just as we all have hundreds of things that we could or should be doing each day, we have many recurring activites throughout the year that have to be taken care of on a monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly or annual basis. And much of our mental capacity can get eaten up by trying to constantly remember to take care of those things.

By creating a master calendar for your practice (see the sample below) and making sure all these items are included, you free up mental capacity. It allows you to mentally relax, knowing you will take care of things in a timely fashion, rather than waking up in the middle of the night thinking “I have to pay my quarterly taxes!” or “Did I send that client a birthday card?” (Some advisors have even adapted the idea of the master calendar to become a marketing tool and value-added service for clients—you can read about the personal master calendar here.)

Once the master calendar is developed, there is a process that goes along with managing these activities, which looks like this:

  • At the end of each month, the team sits down together to go over the next month’s master calendar activities.
  • Each activity is delegated to someone on the team.
  • Each activity is scheduled for one of the four weeks of the month.
  • Work on your assigned task during the master calendar block of time on your model week.
Sample Annual Master Calendar for Financial Advisors Click on the image to download a copy in Excel you can adapt for yourself!

Source: Teresa Riccobuono

I have had advisors tell me that this simple process has changed their practice from reactive to proactive. This follows Stephen Covey’s Time Management Matrix approach of Importance and Urgency (shown below), where the goal is to spend your time focused on activities that are Important without being distracted by those that are Urgent (which allows you to focus on activites that are working on the business, as well as everything that must happen in the business).

In the context of financial advisors, the way to manage this approach and focus your time is to develop a master calendar for activities that you deem important for the successful running of your business, and then dedicate time to accomplish those activities. Take a good look at the sample master calendar. The weekend is coming up—maybe you will have some time to think about how you would tailor the calendar to your own practice.

For more than 20 years, Teresa Riccobuono of Simply Organized has been a practice-management and recruiting specialist to the financial services industry, helping advisors bridge the gap between their existing and their ideal financial planning practice. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area but works with advisors across the country. She is a member of the board of directors of the East Bay Chapter of the Financial Planning Association and is currently the chair of the Public Relations committee. She can be reached at teresa@simplyorganized.com.

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