I used to spend the first 6 hours of my day on servicing – responding to communications, preparing for – and following up from -appointments, creating financial plans, etc.
During that first half of my day, I was just keeping the balls in the air, and I wasn’t making any meaningful progress forward.
Then by the time I got to the second half of my day, I was ineffective.
I didn’t have enough left in the tank for the tasks that would really aid our progress, so I usually ended up productively procrastinating and pushing peas around my plate.
This went on for years.
Last year, we grew by 50% and those 6 hours turned into 8 or 9 and it became obvious it was unscalable.
So I decided to experiment and see what would happen if I limited myself to just 2 hours a day.
That’s right, I was going to squeeze in 9 hours of work into 2…
…and it worked!
Limiting my servicing time to 2 hours instead of letting it meander until I was “done” 10x’d my productivity.
It forced me to prioritize the highest value tasks that only I could do and delegate everything else to staff or technology.
It blocked off potential rabbit holes and a chorus of “done is better than perfect” rang throughout our office.
So if you’re treading water instead of making progress, consider limiting your time for servicing – or whatever your version of that is.
You might just find you’ve been wasting countless hours on tasks that didn’t actually require you simply because the time allowed let the tasks expand to fill it.
