You're listening to “Financial Advisor Marketing”: the best show on the planet for financial advisors who want to get more clients, without all the stress. You're about to get the real scoop on everything from lead generation to closing the deal.
James is the founder of TheAdvisorCoach.com, where you can find an entire suite of products designed to help financial advisors grow their businesses more rapidly than ever before. Now, here is your host, James Pollard.
James: Hey, welcome back to the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast. If you are coming back, if this is your first time, welcome, I'm glad to have you. I am your host, as always, James Pollard. Today we're going deep into one of the most requested topics that I get from financial advisors—productivity, but not the fluffy kind. I'm talking about the hard science, the real-world psychology and battle-tested methods that help real people, just like you and me, get much more done in less time, with a lot less stress. [00:59.5]
If you've ever felt like you know what to do, but you're just not doing it, or if you feel like the days slip away without meaningful progress, then buckle up, because today I'm giving you the five pillars of extreme productivity. The first pillar is that productivity is about managing energy, not just time.
You’ve probably heard a thousand times that you need to manage your time better. You need to get a time-management book or a time-management system. You need to get a planner. You need to time-block. You need to color -code your calendar. Yeah, time management matters, that's important, but there's something that matters even more, energy management, because think about it—you don't actually work with time. You work with yourself and you are not a robot. You are not a machine that doles out the same performance hour after hour, every single minute of the day. You are a biological being. [01:48.8]
You have energy cycles and peaks and valleys. Some moments you're firing on all cylinders, some moments you feel like your brain is mashed potatoes, and if you don't respect those natural rhythms, then no time-blocking system in the world is going to save you. You'll just be tired and scheduled. I guess you'll have a full calendar, and it'll look really pretty, but you'll just be super tired and that is a special kind of misery.
There's a great book out there called The Power of Full Engagement by Tony Schwartz and he leaves this out perfectly. His big idea is very simple, but it's profound. It's not the number of hours you work that determines your success. It's how much energy you bring to those hours and honestly, productivity, that's what it is. It's the output compared to the input. If you can put the smallest amount of input into a thing, like your business, and get the largest output out, then that is being highly productive.
Think about it, one hour of focused, high-energy work can often accomplish more than three hours of dragging yourself through your to-do list. I've been there, everyone's been there, you have days where you crush your project in half the time because you're on. Then you have another day where it just takes forever. That is a sign that you need to get better at energy management. [03:00.5]
Here's where it gets even more interesting. Your brain and, really, your whole body works best in cycles, specifically something called ultradian rhythms, and that's a fancy term, but the idea is really simple—every 90 to 120 minutes, your body naturally wants to shift from high-alertness into a period of lower energy. It's like your internal battery draining down. It just needs a recharge every 90 to 120 minutes instead of trying to grind for five straight hours, which your biology is literally not designed for.
You'll be way more productive if you lean into the cycle, so you work hard for 90 minutes, then take a break. You work hard for 90 minutes, then you take a break. You get up, you stretch, you walk around, and you do something else— and, no, that doesn't mean scrolling social media for 10 minutes. That does not count as a real break, sorry. If you work with your body instead of against it, you'll be absolutely amazed at how much sharper and faster and more creative you feel all day long. [03:55.8]
But let's zoom out even more, because energy management isn't just what you do during the work day. It's about how you live outside of work, too. There are three massive factors that control your energy levels. No. 1 is sleep. I talk about sleep all the time. If you're not getting amazing sleep, then you are just not living your optimal life.
You can go to TheAdvisorCoach.com/sleep. I have an entire article with almost everything that I do to get amazing quality sleep. One of the things that I haven't put in there, or at least I don't think I have, is I've been doing a lot more red-light therapy with red light and near-infrared light, and that has helped. I mean, I can't get much better sleep. I've been optimized for years, but that tends to be something that is extremely powerful.
No. 2 is nutrition. You wouldn't pour maple syrup into your car's gas tank and expect it to run well, right? The same thing is true with your body. If your diet is high-sugar and junk food, you're going to have blood-sugar rollercoasters all day long. You'll feel energized for 30 minutes, and then you'll crash and you'll burn like a cheap firework. [04:59.5]
What you want to do is eat foods that keep your brain humming, like eggs and meats, and nuts and veggies, just simple, clean foods. I know I can get a lot better at this. I have junk food every now and then. I know I could get better at this, so I'm taking my own advice here a little bit more every single day. By the way, hydration matters, too. Even mild dehydration can make you feel really sluggish and distracted without even realizing it. If you feel like you're hitting a slump, just try to drink more water. I guess, in reality, you should probably drink more than you think you need, because your body is always trying to trick you.
No. 3 is movement. Here's something cool. You don't have to run a marathon, you don't have to run a marathon. You don't have to lift a bunch of weights. You don't have to be a power lifter. Even just five minutes of light movement every hour, a little walk, a little stretch here and there, can dramatically improve your blood flow and your brain function, because when you move, you pump oxygen and nutrients into your brain. You literally think better when you're moving. There are entire books about this, about how people have ideas when they're walking. [06:02.0]
Different scientists throughout history, I think Charles Darwin was one of them, he used to walk for ideas. I know in Think and Grow Rich, Thomas Edison would sit for ideas. There are lots of people who go out on walks and have these amazing insights. So, if you're feeling stuck, if you're feeling foggy, get up and walk around the block. Do a couple air squats, shake it out. Do whatever you need to do to get your blood flowing.
If you remember one thing from this section, this very first pillar, let it be this—productivity doesn't start with better apps. It doesn't start with planners or time hacks, or any of that stuff. It starts with respecting your biology. If you manage your energy first, you'll be able to manage your time a whole lot better without even trying.
I spent a lot of time on the first pillar of productivity. I want to move on to the second pillar, which is all about task design, because how you frame your tasks changes everything. Let's talk about something that is quietly killing more dreams, projects and to-do lists than anything else out there, besides not respecting your biology—and, no, it's not laziness. No, it's not procrastination. It's sloppy task design, because most people don't really have a discipline problem. [07:10.3]
There are lots of financial advisors who say, “Oh, James, I want to build a better business. I'm going to get more clients.” They have the ambition. They have the raw material, but they have a clarity problem, because the tasks on their to-do list are not real tasks at all. They're big, fuzzy blobs, like “work on the presentation” or “make progress on the website,” or “get healthier” or “get more clients.” Come on, if you gave your GPS directions like that, like “somewhere over there, I think,” like “GPS, wait, where do you want to go?” Apple Maps, or Google Maps, whatever you use. “I kind of want to go somewhere north, okay? We're north. I kind of want to go somewhere West, all right?”
There's a beautiful piece of research out of NYU on implementation intentions and the research found that when people created specific action-based plans, where they stated exactly what they were going to do, when they were going to do it, and where they were going to do it—basically, they set their intention on how they intended to implement whatever it is that they wanted to do—their success rate skyrocketed compared to people who just had good intentions. [08:15.8]
The people who had implementation intentions beat the heck out of the people with just regular good intentions. In other words, something like “I will exercise” doesn't really get you anywhere. But if you really set your intention on how you're going to implement it and you say, “At 7:30am, after I drink my coffee, I will go for a 20-minute walk around the neighborhood,” that's like action-mode engaging. Do you see the difference between that and “I will exercise”? It is precision. It's specificity. It's giving your brain a clear, simple cue to follow with no guesswork and no hesitation. [08:49.5]
So, the next time you catch yourself writing a vague task like “work on project,” pause and ask yourself, “What exactly am I doing?” Are you going to write a report? Are you going to create an outline? Are you going to send an email? When exactly are you doing it? Are you going to do it today at 2 p.m.? Are you going to do it tomorrow at 8:30am? When exactly are you going to do it? And where exactly are you going to do it? Are you going to do it at your desk, at the coffee shop, at home? Where? Be very specific, because if you can't answer those questions immediately, then you're not as clear as you should be. You want to sharpen it until it is so specific that there's no room for hesitation whatsoever.
Moving on, that's pillar number two. I want to move on to pillar number three, which is about eliminating as much willpower as you can, because willpower is not a strategy. It's like trying to fuel a cross country road trip with a single chocolate bar. You might get down the highway, you might have that sugar rush, but if you're depending on it to carry you through the entire day and the entire race, you're going to end up stranded on the side of the road, and that is not good. [09:54.0]
A much better way is to use systems and habits and automation, because the less you rely on willpower, the more productive you become. I like to think that I have a lot of willpower. I like to think that I have more drive and just the material inside of me to get more done than most people, but the truth is, willpower can't even take me that far. I know that might sound kind of arrogant, but if willpower can't get me to accomplish many of the things that I want, I really don't know how it's going to work for mere mortals out there.
One of the biggest breakthroughs in productivity psychology came from this research on habit loops and you might have heard of this in James Clear’s Atomic Habits. It's a bestseller. It was all over the place for several years. Lots of financial advisors have read Atomic Habits, so if you haven't, that's probably the best habit book ever written.
Here's how it works, boiled down—you have a cue, which is something that triggers the behavior. You have a routine, which is the behavior itself, the habit you want to form, and then you have a reward, which is the positive payoff that locks it into your brain. You get a reward for doing the thing that you want, for doing the habit that you want to form. That's very simple. It's elegant and it's powerful. It's “cue, routine, reward.” Cue, routine, reward. When you get those three pieces right, your brain wires the behavior in automatically. [11:14.6]
Let's say that you want to start writing for 30 minutes every morning. Maybe you're working on sending emails to your email list. Maybe you're working on a book. Maybe you're writing blog articles. It would look something like this. Your cue would be finishing your morning coffee. The routine would be opening your laptop and writing for 30 minutes, just straight up, “30 minutes, I'm going to do it every single morning when I open my laptop.” The reward is, I don't know, checking it off your habit tracker. Maybe you listen to five minutes of your favorite podcast, or you listen to the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast. I am your reward, okay?
Do that for a few weeks, and guess what? You won't even really think about it anymore. It'll be as automatic as brushing your teeth, and honestly, brushing your teeth is based on “cue, routine, reward,” because that will be like the cue is you getting ready to go, go to bed or you just woke up? The routine is you brushing your teeth, and the reward is you have fresh smelling breath and clean shiny teeth. That is “cue, routine, reward.” [12:12.5]
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Now, here's another key. You must design your environment to support your habits. Think of gardening. If you want flowers to grow, you don't just yell at the seeds. You don't just put the seeds in the ground and yell, “Try harder, seeds. Grow.” What you do is you create the right conditions with good soil, lots of sunlight, some water, and some love, of course. The most powerful secret ingredient is love, and the same is true with your behavior. If you want better outcomes, you have to shape the environment around you. You have to make good behaviors easier and make bad behaviors harder.
If you want to read more books, just leave a book on your pillow every morning so it's the first thing you see at night. If you want to stop wasting time on social media, just delete the freaking apps from your phone. Log out after every session. Make it harder to get on social media. [14:02.5]
If you want to eat healthier, keep a bowl of fruit visible to you on the counter. Don't put it away. Actually, make the bad behaviors harder, so hide the cookies, okay? Hide the peeps, if you like those. I love peeps. Hide the Texas Roadhouse cinnamon butter rolls. I wish they would do that. That would help me quite a bit. Whenever I go to Texas Roadhouse and they put those cinnamon butter rolls, all my willpower goes out the window. That's why you can't rely on willpower, because I just don't know what happens to them. It's like I blink and all four are just gone and I feel really full and very happy. But, hey, who knows? They just disappear.
If you want to take this even further, you can start to see yourself differently. You can make an identity-based shift, so you can change yourself from someone trying to exercise to an athlete in training. You can change yourself from someone trying to write a book to a professional author. You can change yourself from someone trying to get organized to an organized person. [14:59.6]
We don't have time to dig into this. This is a very deep topic. I could spend a lot of time talking about this, but identity drives behavior. When you upgrade your internal story about who you are, then your external habits automatically start aligning with it. Start telling yourself the right story. Act like it's already true and the habits will follow.
After this, the fourth pillar is all about focus and deep work, and this can be your superpower if you embrace it, because multitasking is a lie. You need to focus on something. You're not multitasking, I don't care if you think you are. All you're doing is your task-switching really fast, and every time you switch, your brain takes a hit. It's like trying to sprint and trying to tie your shoes at the same time. You're not doing either one really well. You'll probably end up face planting. It is just not good for any of us.
The research is very clear on this. Stanford University ran a study that found that people who thought they were the best multitaskers—the best multitaskers. No one has ever multitasked like these people. They're the biggest, the best—they were actually the worst at it. They were more distracted. They were less effective. They had worse memory than people who just focused on one thing at a time. [16:14.8]
It gets worse. There's actually a concept called attention residue, and here's what that means—it means whenever you switch tasks, like if you're writing an email, and then your phone buzzes and you take a text and then you go back to that email, where you just do the old switcheroo, part of your brain's attention lags behind on the thing you just left. It doesn't come back all the way to the next task, at least not for a while, and that is not good for your productivity, because every time you interrupt your focus, what you're really doing is you're paying a tax. You're paying a focus tax or an energy tax, and just like a real tax, those little percentages add up into a huge, invisible drain on your time, energy and creativity. [16:58.3]
So, if you want to 10x your productivity, stop trying to do everything at once. Stop trying to multitask and just do one thing at a time. Start mono-tasking. Okay? That means doing one thing at a time. That means one tab open, not 25, and I don't even know—can these computers handle 20 or 25 Chrome tabs? Because I had to upgrade my RAM just to open three or four. That means working on one project at a time, not three. That means having one thought in your brain at a time, and yes, I need to do a lot better at this, because it seems like I'm all over the place. Don’t answer texts and emails at the same time while trying to network on LinkedIn and trying to work on your seminar. Don't try to do all that at the same time. One thing.
So, don’t rely on just being disciplined, because nobody is disciplined enough to fight all the constant pings, dings and rings. What you want to do is build a focus fortress around yourself when you're working, so no notifications. Maybe you can turn airplane mode on, if you're brave enough to do that. You can use tools like Freedom. [18:01.5]
I use Freedom all the time. Freedom is a tool that allows me to block certain websites and block apps, where I legitimately cannot access it. During the day, when I'm working, I legitimately cannot access social media sites. I cannot access YouTube. I cannot access news sites. I just completely block them.
If you have the physical workspace, clear it of clutter, no distractions, unless the distractions are there to help you build good habits, like putting books there. Maybe you have your Kindle there. Maybe you have something like the bowl of fruit that we talked about. You want to optimize your environment for you to be as productive as you can possibly be.
Now, here's a little productivity supercharger. When you start your deep work session, do something small and specific that signals to your brain. All right, hey, hey, everybody, pay attention, we are going into focus mode. It could be something like putting on noise-canceling headphones. It could be lighting a specific candle. It could be starting a playlist that you use only for work. The ritual doesn't matter. What matters is that you do it every time. [19:02.6]
What you're doing is you're training your brain like a Pavlovian dog. When you do x, it is time to focus, and for a lot of people, it's their morning coffee. We talked about doing the morning coffee and opening your laptop. For some people, it could be entering the office, right? For me, it's sitting down at my desk, like at my desk where I have the two monitors and the keyboard and my microphone and everything. I legitimately only do work tasks. At this point, I have years of habit ingrained in me that when I sit down at this computer, I am doing nothing but work, okay?
I have a laptop that I use for personal stuff sometimes. I have an iPad that I use for personal stuff and I watch my little YouTube videos on the TV upstairs. But when I'm in my office, I am working. I do not associate my office with anything other than work. [19:50.1]
If you really want to live this idea, I recommend setting aside specific deep work blocks on your calendar. These are 60- to 90-minute chunks. Remember the ultradian rhythms. This is where you do one important task with no distraction. You are not checking email. You are not browsing the news. You are not popping over to check social media for just a second, because it is never just a second. You are working on one task with your full attention. Treat them like meetings to yourself. Treat them like meetings with your most important client, because that is you.
Finally, we have the fifth and final pillar of extreme productivity, which is psychological momentum. This is where you can actually trick yourself into doing more, because when most people think about getting more done, they focus on motivation. They wait for that magical moment where they feel like doing the work. But here's the problem—motivation is unreliable. It's like a cat. It comes and goes when it pleases.
You try to get little Fluffy to eat. Fluffy doesn't want to eat, but when you don't want her to eat at all, she comes on in and just ravages you. “Meow, meow, where's my food?” Heaven forbid that it's daylight savings time, because then that cat is just so annoying. You try to explain to Fluffy that, hey, the clocks have changed. It's really not five o'clock right now. It's not dinner time. But fluffy doesn't care. She's going to get her way. [21:10.3]
Where am I right now? Let's talk about motivation. There is a mountain of research out there, especially from Harvard, and it shows something very simple but powerful. Even tiny progress, progress that you wouldn't really think twice about, fuels motivation. In other words, you don't get motivated first and then make progress. You make progress first and that creates the feeling of motivation, and then it's a virtuous cycle. Progress creates emotional momentum. Emotional momentum leads to more action, and then that more action leads to more progress. It is a self-reinforcing loop.
So, when you're feeling stuck, what you want to do is set yourself a tiny goal. Always start tiny. Don’t tell yourself, “I have to write a whole chapter today.” Tell yourself, “I'm just going to open my laptop. I'm just going to write the first sentence.” By the way, James Clear talks about this in the Atomic Habits book and I think it's one of the biggest takeaways that I got from the entire book. If you have to clean the garage, don't tell yourself, “I have to clean and organize the entire garage.” What you tell yourself is “I'm just going to start with one shelf. I'm going to clean this shelf, and that's it.” [22:16.6]
Your brain is way more willing to start something if it feels small and non-threatening, and once you start, chances are you'll keep going, because starting breaks the inertia. It's like physics. An object at rest stays at rest. An object in motion tends to stay in motion, and you want to use that law in your favor. Once you get a little win under your belt, you want to protect it fiercely, because one little win leads to another. One small completed task makes the next one easier to tackle. That momentum builds on itself.
That's why people use habit streak apps and checklists and little cues that they can do to just keep going. They build a streak, because the goal isn't just to get one thing done, because it's not like you're going to build a fantastic business and get a million clients by doing one little thing. But if you build a streak and you're consistent for long enough, then, man, you can build something incredible. [23:10.6]
All right, let's bring this all home. That is it. That is the collection of five massive research-backed pillars that can seriously transform how much you get done.
First, we talked about energy management, because it's not about how many hours you're awake or you're working. It's about how much energy you bring to those hours. What are you actually accomplishing? That is what productivity is. It is the output from your input.
Second, we talked about task design, which is getting crystal clear on what, when and how, and where and why, and all the details of how you're going to do the things that you want to do.
Then we have systems and habits. That's all about building automatic, frictionless success, instead of trying to muscle through everything with willpower, which is a limited resource. I mean, if you're depending on willpower, you've already lost.
Fourth we talked about focus and deep work, where you cannot multitask very well. I know you think you can. I know you think you can do everything and you can juggle stuff. You cannot. [24:04.4]
Then, fifth, we talked about psychological momentum, which is where you start tiny. You stack these wins on top of each other and you just use that natural wiring of your brain to build unstoppable action.
I hope this helps you, because the world doesn't need more exhausted, busy people. It needs more people who are working deeply, living fully, and making real things happen. That's the path I hope you're on now. Thank you so much for listening today. If you found this valuable, do all the things. Subscribe. Leave a review. Share it with someone who could use it. Put it on social media. Do all the things that help me, okay? You help me now.
Until next time, stay energized. Stay focused. Keep building that momentum, you got this. I believe in you, and I will catch you next week. [24:50.0]
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