Four Ways You're Being Lazy

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Here are four productivity pitfalls that we’re all guilty of and insightful ways you can climb out of them.

Everyone wants a successful practice, but not everyone wants to do the work success demands.

And if you’re not willing to do the work, you’re lazy.

Most advisors aren’t lazy in that they don’t have anything to do. Instead, I meet busy advisors who can never leave the office.

Advisors are so swamped that they can’t implement surge. They don’t have time for cute value adds or to raise their fees.

Because they’re logging long hours at the office, advisors can’t take vacations, let alone remember the last time they had quality family time.

Lazy advisors are working themselves senseless because they’re filling their days with menial tasks instead of doing work that will increase their productivity.

Let me show you four easy routes most advisors default to in their practice and four challenging mindset shifts that will make a meaningful improvement in their work routines.

The lazy route: Getting caught up in entertainment

A coach once pointed out that Ferrari never advertises on TV because successful people don’t watch it. Ferrari doesn’t waste marketing funds where their customers are not.

People who drive Ferraris don’t use them as family cars to shuttle children to soccer games. Ferrari drivers have multiple cars and are either good at leveraging massive debt or are hyper-successful enough to afford them. The people who can afford a Ferrari do not choose to spend their time watching TV.

What to do instead: Spend time intentionally

There’s a time and a place for entertainment. I love good movies, but I’m not streaming Netflix every night. I’d rather be productive or improve my personal development than waste time. I’m always working to push my growth during my free time.

You can think that this pathway to success isn’t that complicated – and you’d be right – but it sure is hard.

It's much easier to read a riveting novel in the morning while you drink your coffee than to read a book on professional development.

Consider if you’re actually following your morning success ritual or if you are copping out because you had another rough night.

The lazy route: Playing office

If you’re finding little ways to stay busy around the office, you’re avoiding things you should be doing. After all, the whole point of playing office is to avoid doing the hard things.

This is why we check the Wall Street Journal or Twitter or troll on LinkedIn. Avoiding hard things could be why you spent three hours researching the perfect microphone and camera combination instead of producing content this morning.

Eventually, we all get so good at avoiding the hard things. We’ve pushed them from our minds and can’t think of hard things to do when we first sit at our desks each morning.

Oh, I don’t have much to do today; I’ll just mess around with Moneyguide Pro.

Sound familiar?

What to do instead: Eat the frog

Instead of wasting time on menial projects that don’t move the needle, eat the proverbial frog, and get the tasks you dread off your plate.

List the hard things you’ve been avoiding and get those done first thing each morning. Print out your list of centers of influence you need to call so that you can contact them before you turn on your computer.

Sometimes, you just have to commit to time blocking to finish the hard things you don’t want to do. You must motivate yourself and get to work – there’s no other way to be successful.

The lazy route: Receiving alerts to feel productive

We all love the cheap dopamine hits from receiving alerts – we feel so productive! Emails are flying back and forth, and our phone is buzzing with updates from the team and invites from friends.

It's hard to resist checking all your notifications to see who thought your last LinkedIn post was witty or where your spouse made reservations for dinner tonight.

Keeping up with the team's alerts and ensuring they’re doing their job feels good and emotionally satisfying in the short term.

What to do instead: Put your devices on “focus mode”

Sure, cheap dopamine hits are easy to come by and enjoyable – but they are productivity killers. If you want to succeed, you need to turn them off.

It's hard to tell your team that you will not read any internal emails from them short of the building going up in flames.

The only alerts you should have on your devices should be for meeting reminders. That’s it. Turn everything else off. Your team can wait until your next scheduled team meeting, and your friends don’t need a text response until you’re finished working for the day.

The lazy route: I should…

Another lazy trap advisors fall into is the “should” category:

I should leave at five o’clock.

I should be on time.

I should do Surge.

Telling yourself that you should make a change without the intention to follow through is incredibly easy. Most of us are guilty of doing this, and it isn’t necessarily something you should beat yourself up over (see what I did?), but you need to be mindful of it.

What to do instead: Take ownership of your choices

The conversation you need to have with yourself isn’t, “I should be on time for meetings,” but, “I choose to be on time for meetings.”

We live in a reactive world. Our ancestors had no choice but to react to the weather as farmers for millennia. But we have the luxury of being proactive in our modern world. We can be exceptionally intentional and proactive with our choices, but it's hard to do.

As you implement these mindset adjustments, don’t suck all the joy out of living or adopt a stoic lifestyle.

Instead, be intentional with your time and choices to reach the success you dream about.

Action items

Be intentional with your time – block the beginning and ending times for what you must do. Plan out a week ahead when you’ll meet with your team, when you listen to The Perfect RIA podcast, when you exercise, etc.

Create forcing mechanisms for the things you're struggling to get done. Have a team member check-in to ensure you’ve completed your tasks. Book a trip out of town to ensure you’re getting in your family time.

Micah Shilanski, CFP®, is a financial planner who achieves the impossible. Micah is recognized as a leader in the concept of lifestyle design for financial planners and has spoken at conferences across the country. Micah is an advisor with Shilanski and Associates, a founder of Plan Your Federal Retirement, and a co-founder of The Perfect RIA.