Technology Won't Organize Us, it Creates a Greater Need to be Organized

Technology was supposed to make our lives simpler, and it has – provided you have discipline and realistic expectations.

One thing it will not do is organize our lives for us.

The inspiration for this post was an article on the Clientwise blog referring to an article in the New York Times recently by productivity guru David Allen. I am a huge fan of Allen's, and over the last few years I have worked hard to incorporate his principles into my daily routine.David Allen, founder & CEO of The David Allen Company

A common complaint I hear relates to information overload. There is just too much we have to process every day. Technology can put information overload on steroids. But it is not the information, it is how we handle it. As David Allen is fond of saying, if the sheer quantity of information were the problem then every time we walked into the library our heads would explode.

Technology is not the cause of our struggle to get the right things done but used poorly it can make the problem a lot worse. Allen's principles can help us do more than get organized (hugely valuable in itself), but can help us tame the technological beast and put it in our service. He suggests a series of five steps to optimize your focus and resources:

• Capture everything that has your attention, at work and at home, and writing. The first time you do this may take as much as six hours to "empty your head." A big project to be sure but a necessary one if the rest of the system is going to work.
• Clarify what each priority means to you. Decide what results you want, and what actions are required.
• Keep an inventory of all your projects someplace where you will see them often, and organize reminders for the to-do lists you create.
• Regularly review your inventory of commitments and projects.
• Deploy your attention and resources appropriately.

As I gradually learn how to utilize technology to apply Allen's principles, I find myself more consistently completing the important tasks I have committed to. I find that the more diligent I am about having discipline in following his ideas, the more productive I am and the more technology helps me accomplish things rather than burying me deeper in a tidal wave of tasks and information. If you struggle with overload of any kind, I strongly encourage you to take a look at some of the articles on Allen's website or to get his book Getting Things Done. His ideas have been a career changer for me.

Your Daily Morning Checklist

I am a fan of to-do lists.  Every morning, I consult one to see what I should be doing.  But there is another step I need to do to make sure that tasks that should be there are included.

Other fans of David Allen’s Getting Things Done discipline know that the key to “stress free productivity” is having a system that will present to you what you need to see when you need to see it, and to make sure that the next action on each of your commitments is in front of you as often as practical.  The To Do list is great at telling you what you need to accomplish today, or what your priorities were yesterday.  But what about that thing you committed a month ago to do tomorrow?  Or remembering that thing you need to do every Wednesday? 

It would be great if there was one system into which you can dump everything you need to do, and have it alert you when each item is due.  Like most of you, though, life doesn’t lend itself to that kind of simplicity.  My client relationship management (CRM) system keeps track of what I need to do for clients.  I am doing a little work for Advisors4Advisors.com, and we use a separate system to collaborate, including shared tasks.  There are personal things that appear on my calendar that need doing (did I get my son his graduation present yet?).  Then there are those personal errands that do not have a place in any of those systems.

Though I shouldn’t admit it, I have my own struggles with paper to-do lists.  In the past, I have spent more time than I wanted transferring today’s incomplete tasks to tomorrow’s new list.  During particularly busy weeks, I may even skip that step, and end up by week’s end with half a dozen incomplete lists that need triage and consolidation.  In regard to that particular challenge, I have started moving tasks to the on-line task management system Nozbe.  When I check something off, it disappears that night, and the lists are automatically updated.  I can access tasks at home, on my Blackberry, or anywhere I can an internet connection.  It is an awesome tool, and I recommend it highly.  I am gradually learning to use its powerful features.  But that is beyond the scope of this post.

So I am stuck, like most of you, with multiple systems that each have things that can be missed and cause me to fall short on a commitment.  To bring it all together, I have a simple morning checklist I go through to make sure I know what I need to do.  Nothing complicated, just a quick run down to confirm that I have checked each of the places where I have recorded the promises I have made to myself, my family, and my clients.  Anything coming up on the calendar?  Check.  Client tasks I scheduled for today?  Check.  In five or ten minutes, I can be sure I have not missed anything that needs to happen today.

I have posted the list I use here, and you can probably customize it easily to work for you.  I still have to do a weekly review, but this provides a quick, daily routine to keep me on the straight and narrow between my less frequent, higher level reviews.

Do you have a morning routine to help keep you organized?  I would love to hear your ideas!



Maybe a financial advisor’s most important checklist

This is a blog about checklists as a financial advisor practice management tool, so you might expect that the most important would be about investments or customer service.  In my view, the most important checklist a financial advisor can employ helps assure the next actions receiving precious attention are the ones that contribute the most to the goals of the practice.

And that checklist is the weekly review prescribed by productivity guru David Allen.  It is the single most important way to keep up on your commitments.

My biggest practice management challenge is follow through.  It is to to remember to do things when the follow up doesn't have to be immediate, or when other tasks take higher priority at the moment.  For most of my professional life as a financial advisor, my follow up was terrible.  There are still times it stinks.  And when follow up stinks, customer service stinks.  I have a great assistant, and delegation is the best solution most of the time.  But I still have my own commitments to fulfill.

A well designed and implemented checklist reminds you of the important things that can easily be overlooked, freeing your mind to express expertise and creativity.  Remembering to follow up on the proposal or transfer paperwork I sent a week ago requires neither creativity nor expertise.  Nor is it urgent.  But it is important.   And, without a system to remind me, I would probably drop it.

The weekly review is an inventory of all your outstanding projects and commitments.  Does each project have a next action on your current to-do list? Do you know the next action for each?  Are there deadlines approaching on any of them?

This assumes, of course, that you have all your projects listed in one place.  Collecting your projects is the basis of a "Getting Things Done" system, and the weekly review is its cornerstone.  You can find out about GTD and the Weekly review here.

Miss doing this conscientiously, and you will constantly be compensating.

Running through the checklist that is the weekly review, you are systematically reminded of the commitments you made.  And always being up to date on your commitments is the most important place a financial advisor can be.

A Practice Revolution?

The next quantum leap in your practice could be from the lowest technology device available: a checklist.

I spent the last eight years building Ensemble Financial Services.  In my role there, I advised financial professionals on enhancing the effectiveness, efficiency and profitability of their practices.  One topic we spent a lot of time on, and what continues to generate a large portion of questions from advisors, was how to more effectively leverage technology.  While I plan to continue working with advisors on various practice management issues, including this one,  I have been increasingly fascinated by the importance of an idea in almost exactly the opposite direction: The power of the lowly, unloved, unsexy, distinctly low-tech checklist.

This isn't the first time we have seen a decidedly unsophisticated tool make all the difference in our practices.  In 2008, when all our fancy analytic gadgetry failed us, it was the telephone keeping us in closer, more frequent contact with our clients, preserving our relationships and our businesses.

My conviction is that you should invest most of your time on your core competency and outsource or delegate the rest.  Two significant books took that philosophy in an unexpected direction.  Getting Things Done by David Allen and The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande.  I wrote an article reviewing Gowande for Transitions Magazine which really got this project going.

Certainly good electronic tools are of critical importance to practice management, but the power here is in the concepts.  The majority of the benefit can be gained simply with pen and paper. But even on paper, I am discovering there are principals behind making it all work, and that's what we will be doing here: Exploring what makes this humble tool so powerful and how we can develop skills using it to achieve mastery in our craft. Examining why so few people embrace the concept, even though the results have been in plain sight for years.  And to share what we discover to enhance our collective success.  I look forward to your participation, and to becoming virtuosos together!