Root Ready
A podcast for growth-minded financial advisors
Root Ready
Why You Feel Busy But Get Nothing Done
Ever end the day feeling busy but not productive? You’re not alone. In this episode, we tackle the productivity paradox that plagues so many advisors—being in constant motion without meaningful progress.
Robert Brault said it best: “We are kept from our goal not by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal.” Lesser goals feel urgent, familiar, and instantly gratifying—but they rarely move the needle. Think emails, Slack messages, and quick wins that pull you away from deep, valuable work.
The most effective advisors aren’t just technically sharp—they’re intentional. They build systems that protect their focus: clear weekly priorities, time-blocked mornings, batching tasks, and limiting distractions.
If you’re feeling stretched thin or stuck in reaction mode, this episode offers practical ways to reclaim your time and energy. Because the goal isn’t just to stay busy—it’s to do the work that truly matters.
Have a question for a future episode?
Submit a question for James here: https://rootreadypodcast.com/
-
Advisory services are offered through Root Financial Partners, LLC, an SEC-registered investment adviser. This content is intended for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered personalized investment, tax, or legal advice. Viewing this content does not create an advisory relationship. We do not provide tax preparation or legal services. Always consult an investment, tax or legal professional regarding your specific situation.
The strategies, case studies, and examples discussed may not be suitable for everyone. They are hypothetical and for illustrative and educational purposes only. They do not reflect actual client results and are not guarantees of future performance. All investments involve risk, including the potential loss of principal.
Comments reflect the views of individual users and do not necessarily represent the views of Root Financial. They are not verified, may not be accurate, and should not be considered testimonials or endorsements
Participation in the Retirement Planning Academy or Early Retirement Academy does not create an advisory relationship with Root Financial. These programs are educational in nature and are not a substitute for personalized financial advice. Advisory services are offered only under a written agreement with Root Financial.
Welcome back to another episode of the Root Ready podcast. I'm your host, james Canole. If you're an advisor and you've ever gone to work and you had an incredibly busy day or what felt like an incredibly busy day, but you went home feeling like you had nothing to show for it, this is the episode for you. So often as advisors, we spend our days doing so many different things, thinking that we're being productive, and at the end of the day, it just doesn't feel like that. We feel worn out, we feel be down, but we don't actually feel like we got anything done. And there's a quote that we're going to go over. I'm going to go over this a couple of times a few times probably and provide some context around how we, as advisors, can take this, can understand this and apply this in a way to make ourselves far more effective in the pursuit of our goals, and by goals I don't just mean our personal goals and ambitions, but the goals that we have to serve our clients as effectively as we possibly can.
Speaker 1:The quote is this many of you probably heard this before. This is from Robert Brault. He says we are kept from our goal not by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal. So what does that mean? Well, to frame it differently or to add some context to this, we oftentimes think that, oh, I'm not reaching my goal because there's an obstacle in the way, there's something preventing me from doing it. And what this quote is saying is there's no obstacle, but to get to the real goal, the meaningful goal, the impactful goal that will actually get you to where you want to go. It's not so much obstacles that we have to be aware of, it's these easier paths to lesser goals, obstacles that we have to be aware of. It's these easier paths to lesser goals. So let's provide some context here.
Speaker 1:Let's start with understanding what your goals might be. Now. Your goal might be a personal goal. If you're an advisor, maybe it's to pass a CFP exam, maybe pass another exam, just like that. Maybe it's to master different topics, whether it's investments or estate planning. Whatever the case might be, it might be a personal goal like that. Or, more often, where I see this is it's client goals.
Speaker 1:It's not uncommon to say let's you meet with a client and this client informs you they're moving across the country to take a new job offer and lots of exciting stuff, but you walk away from that meeting with 10 different action items. You need to do an affordability analysis on a new place where they're working. What might their new cost of living look like? You're reviewing their new benefits packages for them to give them some feedback on what that needs to look like. They have equity compensation as part of their package. You're both sending them some information to inform them and educate them about how that works, plus providing context on how does this fit into their plan. What should they use that equity for? Maybe you're reallocating some of their investments in their brokerage account to say you're going to need to temporarily use some of this for the down payment before they sell their current home and replenish it. Maybe you're running updated retirement projections to say how will this new job impact their long-term goals.
Speaker 1:There's a number of different things that you're doing. So you take all those action items, you schedule them into your CRM and you're excited to help your client accomplish their goal, and it is your goal to get through all these things. Then you have another meeting an hour later and you meet with another client who informs you they were just forced into retirement. They're getting a package, but what they need to do is understand. Should they collect Social Security early now? Can they actually afford to retire or do they need to go back and find something else? Do we need to reallocate our investments to support the decision we make around? Can they retire or do they need to keep working Health insurance? They need that. They need you to connect them to someone who can help them get their life insurance coverage dialed in now that they're losing coverage through their employer. If they are gonna retire, should they start drawing down money from their brokerage account, their cash accounts, their IRA account? Should they start doing Roth conversions? Lots of other goals there Again, goals that you're probably very excited to help them work through.
Speaker 1:You wrap up that meeting, you send the follow-up email, you schedule out all those action items. Then you meet with two or three other clients throughout the day. You're getting, all the while, inbound messages from clients and what you start to realize is oh my goodness, I have all these goals I want to accomplish, but you don't find yourself making any progress towards them and clients are starting to get upset at you of hey, we have this analysis we need to do. We're moving across the country. When are you going to get back to me on what you told me you're going to do, or your other client hey, I'm retiring. This is pretty urgent here. Can you please connect me with that person that was going to help me with some of my health insurance needs? And you feel like you're busy doing all these things but you're not actually making progress towards moving them in the direction they need to move in. Why is that? Well, let's go back to our quote. We're kept from our goal not by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal. Here's how I like to think this.
Speaker 1:I like to relate this in some ways to why do people eat comfort food? You had a long day, a stressful day. You go home and you just snack on potato chips and ice cream sandwiches. Why is that? Well, the demands of your day release cortisol into your body. So, from a scientific standpoint, to start, there's cortisol flowing through your body, which is the stress hormone. Well, what does your body want when they're stressed? It wants dopamine, and these things like potato chips, like ice cream, like comfort foods, they release dopamine immediately. It's a very easy trigger to release dopamine. Now, it's super shallow, it doesn't last, but it gives you that immediate sense of gratification that we're looking for when we're stressed.
Speaker 1:Well, same thing happens in the work world. Oh my goodness, I got this client moving across the country. I've got this client retiring. I have this client that needs something. I have that client that needs something. It's hard work to prioritize what needs to be done first and execute upon that. Not only is it hard work, but it's the end of the day. You've just had three meetings, four meetings, five meetings. All you want to do is give yourself a little mental reprieve.
Speaker 1:So what do you do? You take the equivalent of the comfort food, but in this case it's checking emails. It's checking Slack messages. It's checking social media those little things that you're doing. In the same way, you get cheap calories, cheap dopamine, from the ice cream sandwiches. You get cheap dopamine from Slack notifications, from emails, even if it's another responsibility. There's a notification, you're drawn to it. You feel like checking it is in some way making you productive, but it's not.
Speaker 1:What it is is that's the lesser goal that we're talking about in the quote. We're kept from our goals not by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal. It feels productive to go through your Slack messages. It feels productive. It feels productive to check your email inbox. If we're honest with ourselves, how often are we checking the same 5, 10, 15, 30, 50, whatever it is messages over and over and over again? Yeah, I could go do this affordability analysis. Gosh, that's going to take a little bit of work, a little bit of effort. It's easier to go through my inbox again. Is there any cheap email I can get rid of? Is there any easy access or easy thing I can do to feel like I'm being productive? That's what keeps us from our goal. So, as advisors, we need to recognize that, that to get to our actual goal whether this is personal pass a CFP exam, something like that or whether it's for clients which we absolutely need to make sure we're staying on top of.
Speaker 1:One of the things we'll talk about a lot, or I'll talk about in this podcast, is self-leadership as a quality that defines successful advisors. Does not matter how good you are at the technical components of planning, at investments, even at the financial psychology. All of that is great, but the ceiling on your effectiveness is going to be determined by your ability to lead yourself, and by lead yourself what I mean is your ability to be intentional about the goals you're setting for yourself, for your clients, and to prioritize and execute upon your ability to do that. And to prioritize and execute upon your ability to do that, can you make time to do the important work? Can you do the strategic work first? Can you do the things that matter and let some of these other things the distractions, the noise, the cheap calories of Slack notifications, email checking, other notifications coming in don't let those derail you. So we're gonna talk about how you can do that in this episode, so that you can be the most effective advisor you can be and not get bogged down by lesser goals.
Speaker 1:So the first thing that you need to do with this to be able to address this is understand what that lesser goal looks like. There's a few key things that characterize it. First is it's urgent but unimportant. You got a Slack message. Your teammate needs something. You got a voicemail. You have an email from some people. Sometimes those are urgent and important, but for the most part, they seem urgent because you see the little red notification. Your teammate needs this right now, someone needs this right now, but you need to be able to use your discernment to say is this truly urgent, is this thing that I need to be working on, or is this something that I can push off a few hours while I focus on the most important, the most strategic of the tasks that I need to do? So recognize that it's typically things that are urgent but not important Another indicator that you might be pursuing lesser goals that are holding you back from the big goal.
Speaker 1:The important goal is you're doing things that are easy and familiar. Our brain, our bodies, our minds, our energy does not like friction. There is friction involved with doing meaningful work. There's this whole concept of flow and this whole flow state thing where you can get in the zone and actually do meaningful work and feel like you're in this flow state. There's about 15 minutes of friction that you're gonna go through. You're gonna be sitting with a problem, sitting with a solution, sitting with that retirement analysis, that home purchase analysis, retirement analysis, that home purchase analysis, the things that you need to do. It doesn't just come like that. It takes time with it and in that friction, your mind is telling you to do anything besides that.
Speaker 1:Go check social media. It's an easy dopamine hit. Go check your email inbox. You'll feel productive. Go check your Slack message. You're probably helping out your team member by doing so, you have to ignore all that. You're being drawn to the easy and familiar. We need to force ourselves to say we're going to focus on the things that are strategic and that we need to be doing, and then the final indicator that what you're doing is probably a lesser goal is it provides instant gratification. If you're doing something that gives you instant gratification, it's the equivalent of that potato chip, it's the equivalent of that Dorito Instant gratification but not moving you closer. It's not. It's cheap calories, it's cheap dopamine. It's cheap instant gratification. That's not what we're looking for.
Speaker 1:If you want to be the best you can be, do meaningful work. That instant gratification is how you're going to feel busy. All day long You're checking boxes, you're doing things that are easy. You're checking Slack. You're responding to things that are easy. You're checking Slack. You're responding to things that are easy to respond to and you go home saying I'm exhausted because I was busy all day but I had nothing to show for it.
Speaker 1:Now contrast that to the person that sets time aside, does really important, meaningful work, strategic work. It's hard. It takes several minutes to get into that flow. It takes discipline to tune out some of the distractions, to put your phone in the other room to turn off all notifications, to close out Slack, but you're gonna walk away from that day feeling incredibly energized. So it's that whole concept of easy decisions, hard life, hard decisions, easy life. Do the hard thing, your life will be easier for it. Do the hard thing and you'll move closer and closer to your goal as a result of it. So recognize that. What's the indicator of a lesser goal? It's something that's easy, it's something that's familiar, it's something that provides instant gratification. It's not helping you move closer to your goals or move your clients closer to theirs.
Speaker 1:So what do you do? How do you get better at this? Probably the next episode, the next couple episodes, I'm gonna be releasing what we have as kind of our advisor performance standards, our team performance standards, and putting it together in a format that I'm gonna release publicly as well. But until then, I'm gonna give you some quick hit things. The reality is, this should be a much bigger picture thing. It should be tied towards your personal goals, a long-term, your annual goals, both personally and within the company, and I'm going to give a framework for how to think about that. But in the meantime, what I'm going to do today is just some quick hit things, some tactical things to think about so that you can be the best, you can be the most effective advisor you can possibly be.
Speaker 1:The first thing that you need to be able to do is prioritize. Every single week, you should have a list of what are the top three things I need to get done this week. There's a million things on your plate. There's client stuff, there's personal stuff, there's team stuff. There's a million things, but what are the three things that, if nothing else gets done, if you got those three things done, you would feel like you're making progress. The reason that's important is, if we don't do that, everything becomes important, everything becomes urgent, everything becomes the thing that you need to work on, and what your task list is going to end up becoming isn't something that you intentionally set up. It's going to become your inbox. It's going to become your Slack inbox. It's going to be things that other people are defining for you which are probably not going to align with what you actually want to do. What client work are you going to get done? Probably the client that happens to be the highest in your inbox, the client that keeps checking in with you to say where are we at with this? What team stuff are you going to get done? Probably the stuff that you're getting pestered about most often. Now you're ultimately going to get it done, but only when people have asked you enough time. So that's a horrible way to run your actual task management system how you're actually getting things done.
Speaker 1:Set a weekly top three. Here's the three things I need to get done this week and do the same thing every day Prioritize. Before you wrap up each day, write down the top three things you want to accomplish the next day. The reason this is so important to do before you start the next day is the next day you're not gonna have the same context that you have right now. So if I'm at the end of the workday, I know what's going on I workday, I know what's going on, I know it's urgent. I know what I need to get done. If I can take five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes to say, okay, full day, here's where I need to get done or here's where I did get done tomorrow, what are the most important three things I can do to move myself closer to the weekly top three that I have? If you can do that, what you're doing is you're saving yourself so much time on the front end so that tomorrow morning when you wake up you crack open your computer, you start seeing what's going on. You're not going to spend the first several minutes just kind of sifting through stuff and starting to get pulled in different directions. You are already fully focused on. Here's the things I need to start doing first and you can fully attack them.
Speaker 1:The next thing that you can do is block off focus time. Ideally, this is the first thing that you do at work every day, whether it's the hours of 8.30 to 9, 8.30 to 9.30, if you're a morning person, before the family wakes up, whatever it needs to be. If you can block off time so that before you get into the tactical the tactical being respond to emails, respond to clients, respond to team things that matter, things that you absolutely cannot neglect but if that's all you're ever doing, you're never making meaningful progress. Spend an hour, spend two hours, ideally, but as much as you can, even if it's just 30 minutes, focusing on the strategic. The strategic is what are the strategic things I can do, what are the impactful things that I can do, such that by doing them, I am moving closer to my goals. I move my clients closer to theirs.
Speaker 1:Do not block off focus time and then just read through emails, respond to emails. Now, it could be there's some important stuff in your inbox, there's some urgent requests in your inbox Well, great. That's why the day before, you're spending those last 10 minutes of the day looking through your inbox, looking through your task list, looking through the things you need to do, pulling out the most important emails and saying I'm gonna work on this project first thing in the morning, but the second you jump into your inbox, the second you jump into Slack, your day is no longer your own. Your agenda is no longer your own. There's other people needing things from you and you're not going to be able to focus on the important work, the strategic work. So focus for 30 minutes an hour, two hours if possible, doing the strategic first before jumping into the tactical. Next thing you can do is time block.
Speaker 1:There's a couple of things that I want to point out in this Time blocking. Number one don't check your inbox 100 times a day. That is, as I mentioned before, the perfect example of a lesser goal. I feel like I'm being productive. I feel like I'm being mindful of what's coming. I feel like what you're doing, you're feeling that but it's not actually doing anything. If you're checking your inbox a hundred times a day, that's 98 times that you could have been doing something far more important.
Speaker 1:Set a schedule for how frequently you check your inbox. This could be 11 am, this could be 2 pm, this could be 4.30 pm. Batch the time that you spend actually responding to email. If you do that, you'll be shocked how quickly you can actually get through your inbox way faster than if your inbox is or your approach to your inbox is read through everything and you know that every five, 10 minutes you're going to be reading back through it. When you have that mindset, there's not really any urgency to get anything done with your inbox. But if you know I'm only checking this thing twice a day, three times a day, one time a day in some cases, what you're going to get in the habit of doing is when you check it it's going to actually mean something. You're going to actually respond and ideally you're going to respond to whatever emails need to be responded to, anything. That's a bigger project. You're going to sign that out. You're going to delegate things that need to be delegated.
Speaker 1:As you look through your inbox there's a great book called getting things done, and anytime you look through your inbox there's one of four things you can do. They all start with D. If you can do something immediately, do it. Typically, that means if you can get this done in two minutes or less, just do it. Get it out of there. If you're not doing it, you're deferring it. Okay, this is a big project.
Speaker 1:This client asked me, or they sent me this email saying hey, I'm considering retirement. Here's the things. Can you do a project or projection? Great, I'm probably not going to do that right now, but let me defer that. Let me schedule that on my calendar when I'm going to have a focused block of time to actually devote to that and do it in a meaningful way. Can you delegate it? You know a client just asked me. They said can you open up an IRA for me so I can do whatever? Maybe that's a dumb example, but that's something that you can say yes, absolutely, let me circle in, let me sync in our client service associate. They're going to get on that right away for you.
Speaker 1:So you've delegated that, but you've delegated it appropriately. You've not just sent it off, you have made the connection, you have brought in the appropriate party to take care of it and then finally delete it. Look another invitation to a webinar, another invitation to a conference, another sales request or demo request from a technology provider wanting to show you what they can do. Sales request or demo request from a technology provider wanting to show you what they can do. Don't do all that. Think critically Is this something I should be doing or should I just delete this? This is not going to provide value in doing. This is another great example of a lesser goal. I feel productive because I'm demoing a new technology. I feel productive because I'm going to this conference webpage to see what might I learn here. Really, what you're doing is wasting time. That's not your biggest goal. Delete it. So take that mindset the do the delegate, the defer, the delete to everything that you do, and that's gonna be far more effective when you're batching the times that you check your inbox.
Speaker 1:Other things you can batch financial planning time. You got three plans you need to update. Maybe you're preparing for spring review meetings, fall review meetings, year-end meetings. However you approach it, well, batch that. There's such thing as context switching, where every time you change context, going from email to planning, to prospecting, to whatever you're doing. Your brain doesn't automatically just switch over like that. It takes time for your brain to really ramp up and say, okay, what's the new context of what I'm doing here? That's why batching is so effective. I'm in email response mode, so I'm just going to take care of that. Or I'm in planning mode, so I'm just going to go through a whole bunch of plans. Or I'm in whatever mode continuing education mode. I need to knock those out. Do all of it at once. Do not spread these out throughout the day. The better you can batch your day, the more effective you're going to be in the work that you do.
Speaker 1:And then the final thing is reflect. If you're just setting goals, if you're just setting these things and you're not actually spending time to reflect upon what worked, what didn't work, what would I do differently next time, you're not going to make any improvements. So, yes, setting goals, being intentional, is the first step in all this, but have at least a weekly reflection. How did I do here? Why was it that I couldn't seem to get this specific project done? Is it because I didn't set enough time for it? Is it because I tried to do that every day in the afternoon and really have my best energy, my best focus in the morning. Great, let's recognize that. Let's shift that to something that you do in the morning next time. Why was it that I checked my inbox 100 times a day? That I checked my inbox 100 times a day? Well, is that because you have your inbox app on your phone? Maybe I delete it?
Speaker 1:So think through things as you reflect. What were the barriers? What were the things that prevented you from doing what you wanted to do? What were the lesser goals that prevented you from getting closer to your big goal? And take action, take steps to change that. So let's bring it back to the original quote. We are kept from our goals not by obstacles, but by clearer paths to lesser goals.
Speaker 1:As advisors, we're going to have so many things, so much busy work, so much noise, so much competing for our attention that if we don't master the skills to remove ourselves from all that our effectiveness there's going to be a ceiling capped on it. We're not going to be the types of advisors we can be that our clients need us to be, that we know we want to be. So starting to learn some of these skills is one of the best things that you're going to be able to do to actually take the skill sets, the technical skill sets, the planning skill sets, and be able to apply them in the way they need to be applied. So that's it. There's more coming on this, as I mentioned, creating a lot more resources on this to provide a bigger framework, a better framework of how do we not just look at the tactical, but what's the strategic framework for each of us as individuals, for how we apply this to our lives. So more on that to come, probably in the next episode or two or a few here coming up In the meantime, if you have a question you want me to answer on this podcast, go to the rootreadypodcastcom.
Speaker 1:Submit a question there. Thank you, as always, for listening and I'll see you next time.