The Pitfalls of Busyness: How to Alter Your Shopkeeper Mentality [Episode 8]

To start this episode, Micah Shilanski provides a very valuable comparison between the mentalities of a shopkeeper and a CEO. He starts this way to illustrate the often erroneous assumption that many business owners make about the amount of time they should devote per day to their practice. Workdays start to become these open-to-close events that are very quantity-over-quality phenomenons. Instead, there is an incessant need to optimize days like a visionary or CEO would; doing things efficiently will ultimately transcend the quantity of hours spent. Micah also points out that having a shopkeeper mentality doesn't make much sense because most financial advisors or business owners aren't paid by the hour, but instead by result. Sure, if it takes you twelve hours on a given day to see the best results for your client, that might be true, but consistently overworking and creating busywork are bad habits to cultivate.

Matthew Jarvis then rides the momentum of this concept and admits an area in his own daily practice that isn't very productive. He stresses that reading the Wall Street Journal makes him feel like he is busy, but the pressure to always feel busy is detrimental to the overall value of his practice. For the next hour, instead of spending time on bringing actual monetary value to his firm, he spends an hour reading opinion pieces in the Wall Street Journal. By his own admission, the time is perhaps wasted. To keep the ball rolling, Micah states that there should be an alarm system of sorts in place: a self-administered system of checks and balances that one can use to test if the time being spent is worth a thousand dollars an hour (or five hundred); and through that metric, personal accountability is possible and the value of your firm will only increase. And to keep themselves accountable to what they preach, both Micah and Matt use "forcing mechanisms"--a concept they have underlined in previous episodes as an accountability system and value-building mechanism that one forces oneself to stick to. The forcing mechanism that Matt uses is he looks at a picture of his wife and kids on his desk and asks himself if he could look his family in the eye and say something along the lines of: "Hey, I'm sorry I worked late tonight, but I really had to get the Wall Street Journal read." These type of mechanisms really provide a positive framework for how valuable your workday can and should be.

Lastly, during the talk, Matthew accentuates four key things that advisors should do to save themselves from cultivating a shopkeeper mentality: (1) Eliminate pop-ups, alerts, distractions like email or anything that constantly pulls you away from the task you are focusing on.(2) Don't waste time on guilty pleasures: things like social media or games that you find yourself gravitating towards at all times of the day. (3) Implement a backup plan just in case clients cancel or time is freed up in another way; this way time is always spent productively and with purpose, instead of aimlessly. (4) Lastly, train your employees and clients that you are not available at all times of the day, but only in designated slots. And a bonus thing to consider is to have a clean desk policy to minimize all paperwork that accumulates and to clear your headspace.