Time Management Strategies and Tips for Financial Advisors

Making the best use of your time as an advisor is important for increasing productivity and focusing attention on activities that are likely to yield the biggest return for your business. For example, a 2024 FUSE Research Network survey found that advisors spend just 18% of their time on client service. ¹ Time management for financial advisors is mainly about discipline and creating a routine that helps you make the most of your day.

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8 Time Management Tips for Financial Advisors

How should financial advisors spend their time? That’s a good question to ask as you evaluate your daily routine and working hours. Developing good time management skills can take a little time but the payoff can be well worth it. If you’re looking for ways to get more done each day with less overwhelm, these tips can help.

1. Keep a Daily Time Log

If your days seem to fly by, you may not be aware of exactly how you spend your time. Keeping a daily time log or journal is a way to gain insight into where the minutes and hours go. 

You might keep your log in a paper planner or on your digital calendar. A time tracking app is another option. In your log, take note of:

• Each activity completed
• Time spent per activity
• Time of day the activity was completed
• Who assisted, if anyone

Categorize your activities to see which ones get more of your time than others. If you need some category ideas, you might use some of these from the FUSE survey:

• Business development
• Business management
• Client meetings
• Client service
• Core financial planning
• Specialized financial planning
• Investment management
• Professional development
• Administrative tasks
• Other

If you’re using a time tracking app, you may be able to add categories or use tags to differentiate one activity from another. You might also have the ability to generate a pie chart or graph illustrating how much time you spend in each category. 

2. Establish a Routine

Creating a daily routine is a simple but powerful way to regain control of your time. You can break up your routine into chunks, starting with the period between waking up and starting the workday. Your daily time log can help with this step if you’ve been keeping it consistently. 

Here’s what a sample daily advisor routine might look like:

• Mornings (8-12 a.m.): Review market news, check emails, meeting preparation, morning team meeting, daily calendar review, client meetings
• Afternoon (1-4 p.m.): Investment research, financial plan development, prospecting
• Early evening (4-5 p.m.): Return phone calls or emails, execute trades, finish daily paperwork/reporting, prepare the next day’s to-do list

You can decide how much time to allocate to each task within each block.  A routine can have a positive impact on your career path if you’re cultivating good time management habits and getting rid of bad ones that may be costing you precious minutes or hours throughout the day.

3. Use Lists Strategically

Keeping a to-do list can help you to stay organized but if there’s too much on it, you’re likely to get to the end of the day and feel like you’ve accomplished nothing. If you’re just making one big list each day, consider how you might group activities.

For example, you might use three categories: Must get done, would like to get done and doesn’t need to get done yet. You can then choose your top three tasks for the must-get-done category and work on those while assigning other tasks to the lower-priority categories.

If you struggle to keep track of to-do lists, your customer relationship management (CRM) platform may offer built-in task lists. You may be able to sort tasks by priority, target completion date, or completion status so you can easily stay organized. 

4. Be Proactive

Putting everything on your to-do list can backfire if you end up procrastinating when it comes to doing certain things. Or you may simply feel bogged down by the size of the list itself. Here’s a simple rule that can help with time management: If something can take less than five minutes, do it without adding it to your list.

Acting quickly on smaller items can help you keep your to-do list from becoming cluttered. However, this does require you to be realistic about time estimates when deciding what to act on right away. For instance, you might intend to call a client or colleague for a quick five-minute chat but that can easily turn into an hour-long call.

5. Automate Your Lead Gen and Marketing

Marketing and lead generation are two critical components of building and growing an advisory business. While these efforts can be time-consuming, SmartAsset AMP can simplify client acquisition by minimizing the effort required for prospecting and automating much of the nurturing process. This enables you to focus more on finalizing deals and delivering value to your clients.

Automation tools can also help with simplifying and streamlining some of the behind-the-scenes tasks that are necessary for running your business. For instance, you might use automation software to manage bookkeeping and recordkeeping or to onboard new clients.

Artificial intelligence tools, meanwhile, can make it easier to draft marketing content for social media posts or email newsletters. The more you can automate, the more time you can free up to focus on other things.

6. Delegate

There are some things you may not be able to automate in your business, but you might be able to take them off your plate by delegating.

Going back to the email decluttering example mentioned earlier, that’s something that a virtual assistant could help with. Virtual assistants for financial advisors are trained to handle a wide range of activities, from inbox management to scheduling to recordkeeping.

Outsourcing may require you to make an investment of money for those services. However, that could be justified if you’re able to reclaim valuable hours that you could spend prospecting or engaging with clients.

7. Put Yourself On Your Calendar

Overwork can lead to financial advisor burnout which can have negative consequences for your business if you’re unable to focus or find yourself losing interest in your work. When implementing time management strategies, it’s important to consider where time for yourself fits in.

For example, ask yourself if it’s possible to:

• Add small breaks throughout the day, along with a longer break for lunch so you have time to recharge and rest.
• Establish firm boundaries around phone or laptop use during non-working hours. 
• Commit to regular days off that do not involve any work-related activities. 
• Develop a system for managing client communications when you’re unable to respond right away. 

Creating balance between work and home may improve stress levels, physical health and mental health. In turn, you may have more energy to approach growth-focused tasks that move your business forward. 

8. Plan Ahead

Being productive is all about getting as much done as you can with the time that you have. If you take the time to plan your projects and tasks in advance, you’ll always know what to work on next when you’re not meeting with clients or handling routine business matters. This can save countless hours trying to decide what you should work on next or what the most important thing to do is.

Planning ahead can help you ensure that you are prepared to fill the random 15 minutes of your day as well. If you have a proactive list that outlines what’s next because of a prior planning session, then you’ll be able to get something done between meetings instead of not thinking you have enough time or not knowing what to jump into with the time you do have.

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Why Is Time Management Important for Financial Advisors?

A typical day in the life of a financial advisor involves juggling a wide range of tasks. Some of the most important things an advisor does in a day can include:

• Reaching out to prospects
• Reviewing financial plans
• Meeting with current clients
• Networking
• Managing the administrative side of running an advisory business

A 40-hour workweek is a given, though it’s not unusual for advisors to work longer hours or complete work-related tasks on weekends. Time management is critical for ensuring that the most important things necessary to grow your business get done while enabling you to maintain some work-life balance.

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Benefits of Time Management for Financial Advisors

Managing your time more effectively as an advisor can benefit you and your business in more ways than one. When your days have a set structure and routine, for example, it becomes easier to prioritize where you spend your time and stay focused on the task at hand.

Rather than jumping from one thing to the next, you can move through the day in an orderly, organized way, reducing stress in the process. Embracing time management tips also makes it easier to identify potential time drains and weed them out.

If you notice that you’re spending a significant amount of time decluttering your email every day, for instance, you might decide to delegate that task to someone else or at the very least, put a time limit on how long you’ll spend sorting through messages.

Learning to better manage your time can help your business become more efficient and potentially give your productivity a boost. That can be a relief if it feels like you’re constantly busy but not actually moving the needle on growth. Last but not least, good time management can allow you to maintain balance by drawing a line between working and non-working hours.

Bottom Line

Good time management can help you to grow your practice without stretching yourself too thin in the process. If you’re just getting started, keeping a time log that tracks what you do on a normal workday can give you some perspective on where the minutes and hours go. Once you get a routine in place, it’s a good idea to review it regularly to see what’s working and what’s not, then adjust accordingly.

Tips for Growing Your Advisory Business

• SmartAsset AMP (Advisor Marketing Platform) is a holistic marketing service financial advisors can use for client lead generation and automated marketing. Sign up for a free demo to explore how SmartAsset AMP can help you expand your practice’s marketing operation. Get started today.
• Digital marketing can be a powerful way to connect with prospects and establish your brand. If you’re not working on creating a digital footprint yet, you could be missing out on opportunities to grow your client base. Learning digital marketing strategies, including social media and email marketing, can help to increase your visibility online and make it easier to attract clients to your business.

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